Thinking God's thoughts after Him : a retired man's meditations

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BV A821 .K57 1914

King, Henry Melville.

Thinking God's thoughts

after Him

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Thinking God's Thoughts
After Him

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A RETIRED MAN'S MEDITATIOl

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HENRY MELVILLE KING, D.D.

PASTOR EMERITUS OF THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, PROVIDENCE, R. I.

Author of "Mary's Alabaster Box," "Our Gosptls," The Messiah in

the Psalms," "Why We Believe the Bible," "Religious

Liberty," "The Baptism of Roger Williams,"

"John Mylis," "Sir Henry Vane, Jr."

etc, etc.

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BOSTON: THE GORHAM PRESS

TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED

Copyright, 1914, by Henry M. King

All Rights Reserved

The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.

PREFACE

It is for the purpose of encouraging men to
think God's thoughts after Him that these chap-
ters containing some of " the meditations of a
retired man " (to borrow a phrase from Sir Henry
Vane, Jr.) have been collected, and are offered
to the public. God's thoughts, when they become
man's thoughts, determine character and destiny.
'* You shall know the truth, and the truth shall
make you free," said the infallible Teacher sent
from God for the distinct purpose of making
known to men the mind and will of the Father.

The original plan in preparing this little vol-
ume for the press contemplated a short preface on
" Certainty of Faith." But that important topic
would not allow Itself to be compressed within the
limits of a narrow preface, but claimed a chapter,
though brief, for itself. The discussion is still
altogether too brief, measured by the importance
of the theme. It will serve, however, to suggest
the possibility and the necessity of having a definite
apprehension of that definite, saving " faith once
delivered to the saints." May the promised
Spirit of Truth bless every effort, however hum-

3

4 PREFACE

ble, put forth In the interest of a positive religious
faith, and still perform his gracious office of guid-
ing inquiring minds Into all the truth,

Henry M. King.
Providence, R. I.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Certainty of Faith 9

II. The Bible, Our Great Educational As-
set 32

III. The Church of Christ in the Nine-

teenth Century 135

IV. Peace and Light on the Cross, an Inter-

pretation 210

V. Mrs. Emma Willard, the Pioneer in the

Higher Education of Women , . . 234

THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS
AFTER HIM

Thinking God's Thoughts

CHAPTER I

CERTAINTY OF FAITH

CAN we know the mind of God? Of course
the finite mind cannot fully comprehend the
Infinite Mind. But it is generally believed that
God has revealed Himself in the moral nature of
man, who was created in his image; in the physi-
cal universe which, as the Psalmist affirmed, de-
clares his glory; in his dealings with his intelli-
gent creatures, which have enabled men to say,
"There is a Divinity which shapes our ends";
and above all in the Revelation which we call pre-
eminently and in harmony with its own claims,
" the Word of God "; and it is believed that He
has revealed Himself sufficiently to meet all the
practical purposes of this life, and to instruct and
prepare men for the life to come. The great
Teacher said, " This is life eternal to know Thee
the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou
hast sent." Man's highest ambition and chief

9

lo THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

glory should be, as far as possible, to know the
mind of God, and to think his thoughts after Him.
All other knowledge is unsatisfying and unim-
portant in comparison with this.

Man's tendency is to philosophize about what
is revealed, and to speculate beyond what is re-
vealed, and hence we have changing and contra-
dictory views of religious truth, and idle conjec-
tures, which are born of human ignorance, and
have only a human basis of authority. A safe
and incontrovertible canon of interpretation is
this: "The obvious meaning of the Word of
God is the Word of God," as binding in the
twentieth century as in the second. To affirm
that Christianity has not a definite historical
quantity is to repudiate it altogether.

It would seem that with so many sources of
knowledge there should be a satisfying degree of
fullness and a reasonable degree of unanimity.
The truth of God does not change, and is always
made known as the truth of God to the willing
and obedient spirit. " He that willeth to do his
will shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of
God."

The truth of God is unaffected by divergent In-
terpretations, or by changing climes or centuries.
Some people are led astray, it is to be feared, by
the specious plea that truth must be expressed in

CERTAINTY OF FAITH ii

terms of modern thought, which often covers a
wide departure from or an actual denial of the
truth of God. As it is frequently used it covers
a multitude of heresies. Some theologians seem
to have adopted the famous saying of Heraclitus,
" All things are in a state of flux, and nothing
abides." The faith of yesterday is discarded and
outgrown to-day by reason of supposed new light.
The old and the tested must give place to the
ever-changing modern, and the more modern the
modern is the more acceptable it sometimes seems
to be, until a recent English writer, himself a mod-
ernist, is constrained to declare that *' Modern
lives of Christ have become too modern." In
like manner it may be said that some modern in-
terpretations of the Bible and revealed religion
are too modern. If the modern thought of to-
day is to give way to the more modern thought
of to-morrow, the time will soon come, if it has
not come already in some quarters, when Christ
will not be able to recognize his own Gospel, and
the note of finality and universality which rings
out clearly and unmistakably in the great commis-
sion, will be silenced forever. Another English
writer declares that American Christianity is now
divided into two schools. " The one is ortho-
dox. . . . The other school seems to have sacri-
ficed almost everything which makes Christianity

12 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

distinct from a temporary philosophy. Its mem-
bers have the bad habit of preaching eugenics in
the place of the Gospel. They appear to be
afraid of the great Epistles and the nobler pas-
sages of the Gospels, and are apt to speak in terms
which would suggest that there was nothing dis-
tinctive in Christianity which can make it an ab-
solute and universal faith. They have become
afraid of the historian and the natural scientist.
Unless they are careful they will prove to have
sold the pass to the enemy from an unmanly and
needless timidity." Professor Josiah Royce in
" The Problem of Christianity " frankly says,
*' What views or types of views are, or ought to
be, characteristic of the modern man, hardly any
of us will wholly agree in defining. And if there
is any typical modern man, he would seem, at first
sight, to be a creature of a day. To-morrow
some other sort of modern man must take his
place. And of the modern man of a future cen-
tury we now cannot even know the race, much
less, it would seem, the religious creed."

We are hearing much in these days about " a
progressive revelation," a phrase which probably
does not always mean the same thing on different
lips. No one doubts that God, the God of na-
tions and of our lives, is constantly revealing Him-
self in human history and in personal experience

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 13

to those who are wise enough to detect his pres-
ence and his guiding purpose. But when the
technical term, Revelation, is employed, as it con-
stantly is, to denote the plan of salvation unfolded
in the Bible in the prophetic history of God's
ancient people and in the life, teachings, death,
resurrection and completed mission of his only
begotten Son, our Lord, it can be called progres-
sive only in the sense of an advancing conquest
to itself of the faith of men and nations, but not
in the sense of an increase or modification of its
original content and substance. Christ com-
manded that his Gospel, the Gospel which He
committed to his disciples, should be preached in
all the world to every creature. The apostle
Paul expressed his astonishment that men should
for a moment be tempted to surrender that Gos-
pel for another, which was " not another," and
pronounced an anathema upon those who yielded
to the temptation. Christ's Gospel could not be
duplicated or outgrown. For it there was no
possible substitute, and never would be.

President Arthur T. Hadley, speaking of
" some influences in modern philosophic thought,"
says truly enough, " Fashions in thinking have
changed nearly as fast as fashions in dress. Sys-
tem has succeeded system with bewildering fre-
quency. The idol of to-day is the antiquarian

14 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

curiosity of to-morrow." But when he or others
imply that similar changes are to be expected and
are actually taking place, not only in the fashion
of religious thinking, but in the substance of re-
vealed truth, so that they constitute a progressive
revelation, the implications are utterly without
warrant. President Hadley says, " The poet of
to-day, like the Hebrew poets of old, is essentially
a prophet, the bearer of a progressive revelation;
one of a historical chain of seers, feeling after
God, if haply they may find Him, and each in his
own way bringing men a little nearer to the
truth." There seems to be ample evidence that
the inspired Psalmist not only felt after God, but
that he actually found Him, and that his inspira-
tion was of a unique kind, altogether different
from that of Kipling and Walt Whitman, more
authoritative and commanding than theirs, a bet-
ter and truer and more trustworthy revealer of
God and duty and the spiritual nature of man,
and not only not surpassed by, but not to be
classed with, the progressive inspiration of the
latest modern poets.

As an illustration of the continued progress in
the fashion and substance of poetic religious think-
ing. President Hadley makes the following com-
parison. " No longer do we content ourselves
with saying, as Tennyson did.

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 15

" Our wills are ours, we know not how, s

Our wills are ours to make them thine."

We deem it a truer, as well as a nobler conception
of life, to say with the more modern poet,

'■ East and west and north, wherever the battle grew,
Forth to a feast we fared, the work of the will to do.
Pillar of cloud by day, by night a pillar of fire,
Sons of the will, we fought the fight of the will, our sire."

We are prompted to ask, is it true that this is
" a truer and nobler conception of life," that the
enthronement of the human will is indicative of
genuine progress? Is not the submission of the
human will to the divine will, and its harmoniza-
tion with the revealed will of God, the method
and the secret of the highest manhood? Christ
disclosed the supreme motive and Inspiration of
his perfect life, when He declared, " I came not
to do mine own will, but the will of Him that
sent me." It would seem, then, that the " pro-
gressive revelation " so called, as manifested in
recent poetry, carries us not only beyond the
teaching of Tennyson and David, but even beyond
the wisdom of God as revealed in the teaching of
Jesus Christ. What the next generation of
poets, " the bearers of a progressive revelation,"
will attain unto we can scarcely imagine. We
must modestly confess with Professor Royce, " we

1 6 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

now cannot even know the race, much less the re-
ligious creed."

But in all seriousness, the truth of God, re-
vealed In his Word, If it Is the truth of God,
should control and determine modern thought,
and not be controlled and modified by it. New
thought is not always or necessarily true thought.
A change of view is often mistaken for growth
and progress. That there is a legitimate growth
and progress, the Scriptures plainly avow. But
" growth In grace and in the knowledge of our
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ " cannot be under-
stood as meaning the rejection of revealed truth
or a modification of It, but evidently a deeper ap-
prehension and a richer experience of it, not a
growth out of, but a growth in and into, that Is
the normal and expected development of the be-
liever In Christ by the use of the means which
He has provided from the beginning, for the use
of the earliest disciples and also of the latest.
In his able volume, " The Christian View of God
and the World" (p. 25), Dr. James Orr says,
" Bit by bit, as the ages go on, we see more clearly
the essential lineaments of the truth as It Is in
Jesus; we learn to disengage the genuine truths
of Christ's Gospel from human additions and cor-
ruptions; we apprehend their bearings and rela-
tions with one another, and with new truths, more

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 17

distinctly; we see them in new points of view, de-
velop and apply them in new ways. All this is
true, and it is needful to remember it, lest to
temporary points of view, and human theories
and formulations, we attribute an authority and
completeness which In no way belong to them.
But it does not by any means follow from this that,
therefore, everything in Christianity Is fluent, —
that it has no fixed starting-points, no definite
basal lines, no sure and moveless foundations,
no grand determinative positions which control
and govern all thought within distinctly Christian
limits, — still less that, in the course of its long
history, theology has achieved nothing, or has
reached no results which can fairly be regarded
as settled." The strangest delusion of our times
Is the exaltation of the fickle and illusive Zeitgeist
to the position of supreme arbiter In the realm of
revealed truth. Anyone familiar with the prog-
ress of religious discussion through the Christian
centuries knows that the so-called modern thought
is not so modern, for the most part, after all.
Every truth of revelation has been called in ques-
tion again and again in the long past by the sup-
posed spirit of the time, and over against It has
been arrayed the " new thought " which has had
its little day and won a limited following. Dis-
carded error ever and anon Is revived, and poses

1 8 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS .

as newly discovered truth. One of the best pre-
ventives against erroneous views of religious
truth, is familiarity with church history.

In a volume which has been recently published,
entitled " Foundations of Christian Belief in
Terms of Modern Thought," and containing es-
says by seven Oxford men, the foundations have
been so effectually undermined that the reader is
compelled to ask, " If the foundations be de-
stroyed, what shall the righteous do? " One of
the seven essayists, having repudiated the au-
thority of the Scriptures as well as of the Church,
declares, " Forms and habits of thought change
from age to age, and thus in a limited sense new
theologies are required." He is constrained to
say, however, " But unless we are to suppose the
Christian thinkers of the past to have done their
work wholly amiss, we ought not to expect to find
the new theologies turning out to be radically at
variance with the old. Human nature, after all,
varies but little from age to age, and Jesus Christ
is the same yesterday, to-day and forever." He
then strangely adds, " He who would teach a new
truth or reject an old, . . . must face the prima
facie likelihood that his own prophecy may turn
out false." It would be a thought distressing
beyond expression that the ultimate truth, the
saving truth of God, the wisdom that is able to

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 19

make wise unto salvation and eternal life, has
not been apprehended by the fathers, and is not
at the present time positively attainable, and that
we are consigned to the deplorable condition of
those who are " ever learning and never able to
come to the knowledge of the truth."

The essential truths of Christianity are facts,
not fancies or theories. The fundamentals
though often assailed, are among the things which
" cannot be shaken." Men may differ as to non-
essentials, but be solid as to the fundamentals.
The mythical theory of interpretation has received
little favor at the judgment-bar of enlightened
human reason. There is a wonderful harmony
and consistency between the character and the
words and the deeds of Christ, Accept the fact
of his supernatural origin and nature, and all else
is supernaturally natural; it is just what would be
expected, and occasions no surprise. The person
of Christ stands out in clear outline like the sum-
mit of some lofty mountain against a cloudless
sky, not cold and snow-capped, but warm, glow-
ing and glorified in the light of the setting sun;
rather He is like the sun itself, shedding his light
upon the loftiest summits of human thought and
into the deepest valleys of human experience. He
is the great outstanding miracle of Christianity.
He still lives in the lives and the institutions of

20 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

men and nations. He was taken up out of the
sight of his followers, but his influence yet sur-
vives, increasing from century to century. Every
new generation in the progress of the Christian
centuries is adding its additional weight to the in-
creasing volume of Christian evidences. The
highest civilization shows abundant fruits of
Christ's presence and influence in the world. As
another has said, " Christ has changed the map
of the world." As you cannot classify Him,
neither can you annihilate Him. The doubter
and denier, not the believer, is compelled to at-
tempt the task, of justifying himself in the eyes
of men. Dr. Jesse B. Thomas has said, " If
Christians believe the Bible superhuman, and ac-
cept the revelation it makes of things beyond proof
on its testimony, they show themselves neither
unscientific nor unphilosophic." " Probability is
the guide of life," as Bishop Butler long ago
wisely said. Christianity, at first believed on rea-
sonable evidence to be of divine authority, offers
to demonstrate that authority in personal experi-
ence to him who will " do the will of God." Its
eternal challenge is " come and see." Probabil-
ity may be so convincing, when acted upon, as
to become absolute certainty. If Christ and
Christianity do not furnish a basis for certainty
of faith, there is nothing trustworthy in human

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 21

knowledge, history or experience, the history of
men and of nations is nothing but a dream, and
the world itself a great unreality.

There may be honest doubt in a mind willing
to be convinced and honestly seeking after truth,
but not yet wholly persuaded of its validity. Such
a mind is never kept waiting long. Christ will
come to it as to Thomas, and lead it from a state
of painful uncertainty to a full confession and an
assured peace. But it is easy for a man to de-
ceive himself. He may think he is simply in
doubt and in a state of uncertainty, when he is
already rooted and grounded in error. " The
heart is deceitful above all things." A Scotch-
man is reported to have said, " he was willing to
be convinced, but he should like to see the man
who could convince him." A man's so-called
doubts may be little less than bald and obstinate
denials. Dr. Van Dyke speaks of men " whose
doubts were more dogmatic than dogmas." Prof.
Shailer Mathews says, " There is no dogmatism
so intolerant as that of unbelief." To deny a truth
is to affirm its opposite. A creed of negations,
if it was possible, would be as useless as it would
be morally indefensible. Faith, and faith alone,
gives strength of character and of purpose.

The will to believe is a sacred right, and is as
indicative of intellectual freedom as the will to

22 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

deny. In revealed religion, as well as in accepted
science and accredited history, there are certain
well established and unalterable facts, which con-
stitute a creed. To hold such a creed is no sac-
rifice or infringement of personal liberty or in-
tellectual freedom. Liberty is not lawlessness
and unrestrained license. True freedom is not
freedom to do wrong or to believe a falsehood.
Civil liberty is liberty regulated by law. Intel-
lectual liberty is liberty regulated by truth. If
revealed truth, clearly enunciated and easily com-
prehended, does not hold men, their freedom is
not the freedom that truth imparts. Openness
of mind does not imply emptiness of mind, or a
mind that contains no ascertained beliefs, and no
deposit of sacred and verifiable truth. Unset-
tledness of conviction is no evidence of superior
intellectuality. Great thinkers have been great
believers from the days of Paul and Augustine to
Jonathan Edwards, and from Jonathan Edwards
until now, who have believed that God, in his in-
finite wisdom and grace, has given to the world
a permanent and authoritative standard of faith,
and have been unaffected by the ever changing,
anti-evangelical Zeitgeist, which has been much
more formidable and influential in other days than
it is at the present time. Doubt is now, as Dr.
Jesse B. Thomas has said, one manifestation of

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 23

" the universal restlessness of our time which pro-
tests against the intrusion of authority in any
sphere. In politics, in industrial life, in social
ethics, in domestic relations, in fashion of dress, in
amusement, in journalism, in literature, in personal
behavior, there is a defiant and almost deafening
outcry against the tyranny of ' tradition,' of con-
ventionality, of custom, o'f fixity in law or institu-
tion. Every existing institution becomes the sub-
ject of criticism and of proposed readjustment to
fit the needs of the Zeitgeist. It might well be
expected, then, that a new fashion in religion
would be also proposed." It is claiming too much
to assert that all present theological dissent is the
result of accurate scholarship or of unusual mental
acumen and a careful reweighing of the grounds
of religious belief. Many Biblical scholars on
both sides of the Atlantic, of recognized standing,
find the legitimate scholarship of the present time
strongly confirmatory of faith in the Bible as the
Word of God. Fresh attacks always call forth
fresh and stronger defenses. To possess no fixed,
settled convictions, instead of being commendable
and matter of boasting, may be proof of culpable
neglect or intellectual impotence. Certainty of
belief produces the truest spiritual liberty as well
as abiding peace of mind. The possession of

24 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

truth is infinitely better than the fruitless and end-
less search after truth.

Moreover, instead of vainly exploring the un-
known and the unknowable, and indulging in un-
verifiable and useless speculations, men should
rejoice that so much has been made known, and
hold fast to the truth which has been plainly re-
vealed. An aged minister once said to my youth-
ful mind, perplexed by the mysteries of life and
death, of God and the future, as we came away
from a funeral-service in which we both had par-
ticipated, " Let us not be troubled about the un-
known, which a wise God has not seen fit to re-
veal; let us rather thank God that we know so
much."

Christ's mission was not a failure. He said,
" I speak the things which I have seen with my
Father," and declared Himself to be " the way
and the truth and the life." He was " God man-
ifest in the flesh." He conditioned discipleship,
spiritual freedom, salvation, eternal life upon the
knowledge of his Word and continuance therein.
He is still " the light that lighteth every man that
Cometh into the world." His light can never be
dimmed or superseded. All human lights pale
before it. He is the central sun in the moral and
spiritual heavens. To be his disciples and learn
of Him is to walk in the light, which can never

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 25

lose its Illuminating and life-giving power, and is
destined to dispel the darkness of doubt and ig-
norance and sin, which now beclouds human
minds. Certainty of faith can be found in Jesus
Christ, and is ever authenticating itself in Chris-
tian experience.

The fathers had great strength of faith and
clearness of faith, because they had deep and
thorough experiences. It is not only true, as
Goethe says, that " What you have inherited from
your fathers, you must earn for yourself before
you can call it yours," but it Is also true that what-
ever of religious faith you have Inherited from
your fathers you must experience for yourself be-
fore you can truly call It yours. Experience not
only holds the title deed of faith, but it is Its test
and Its certain verification, " Now we believe,"
said the Samaritan villagers, " not because of thy
saying, for we have heard Him ourselves, and
know that this is Indeed the Christ, the Saviour of
the world."

Robertson Smith makes this confession, " If I
am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word of
God and as the only perfect rule of faith and life,
I answer with all the Fathers of the Protestant
Church, because the Bible Is the only record of
the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible
alone I find God drawing near to man in Christ

26 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Jesus, and declaring to us in Him his will for our
salvation, and this record I know to be true by
the witness of his Spirit in my heart, whereby I
am assured that none other than God Himself is
able to speak such words to my soul."

An experimental religion is the only religion
that has value, and the only religion that gives
promise of permanence. No man is qualified to
judge Christian truth, or to determine its reality
and genuineness, unless he has seen Its fruits and
felt its power In his own soul. His spiritual sen-
sibilities must be first quickened and his spiritual
eye opened. " These things are spiritually dis-
cerned." A faith which is deeply rooted In per-
sonal experience Is not likely to weaken or change
or perish. Modern doubt and infidelity are often
born of a lack of experience or of a religion of
form and ceremony, which lays the supreme em-
phasis upon some outward act or rite, and ignores
the Inward life. What is needed in our time and
In all times to preserve our Christianity as a di-
vine and authoritative religion for the world is not
a new interpretation or a new philosophy of re-
ligion or a progressive revelation (if such a thing
were possible and within the power of man to
accomplish), but a deeper and richer experience
of the truth as it is in Jesus, men who believe be-
cause they have tasted and tested, and have felt

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 27

their souls responding penitently, humbly, affec-
tionately and approvingly to the great unchanging
verities of revealed truth. We are not straitened
in God or in his truth, which is able to save to
the utmost in this and every generation, but we
are straitened in ourselves.

The deeper experience will give certainty to
faith in the pulpit and in the pew. Ministers will
then be indeed ambassadors for Christ, bearing
a certain, distinct message. They will " preach
the Word," not human opinion which changes
from year to year, and possibly from week to
week, but God's truth, divine, authoritative, un-
alterable, and divinely adapted to the spiritual
needs of men. Whether the hearers believe what
the preacher preaches or not, they must believe
that he believes it, and that he believes it to be
God's message entrusted to him. Otherwise the
influence of his preaching will be nil, and worse
than nil. A minister without definite faith, born
of a vital Christian experience and certified as to
its divine character, would be out of place in a
Christian pulpit. He has mistaken his calling.
President Henry Churchill King does not hesi-
tate to say, " The moral or spiritual prophet, who
speaks, as out of his own insight, what he has
only caught up from another, is himself a fraud,
and cannot help another into reality of life."

28 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

A minister of Christ cannot know everything.
There are vast reahns of knowledge beyond his
ken. But there are some things which he must
know, and know for a certainty, if he would be
a faithful steward of the grace of God. The
Christian pulpit stands for a distinct something in
all lands and in all ages. It is founded upon a
definite message, which has created it and justi-
fies its existence. It is to give no uncertain sound,
but an authentic proclamation of prescribed truth.
It is not a searcher after truth or a discoverer of
new truth, but a possessor and proclaimer of ac-
cepted truth. It is not an interrogation point,
or a weather-cock veering with the changing wind.
Its finger is the magnetized needle, pointing in-
variably and surely to the star in the heavens.
The true minister is to be a safe leader who
knows the way through the wilderness of con-
flicting opinions, and is able to guide others in
it, a competent instructor who has himself been
instructed and is not carried about by every wind
of doctrine, and a believer whose faith rests se-
curely upon the solid rock of revealed and ex-
perienced truth, and who can say with humble
assurance, " I know whom I have believed."

Professor William Adams Brown of Union
Theological Seminary says, " The world has a
right to ask of the Christian minister that he

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 29

knows what he believes and why he believes it.
... It has a right to ask of the man who speaks
to it of God's continuing power to renew and
to transform, that his own life should evidence
the truth of his words," in others words, that the
truth preached should be illustrated and confirmed
in the experience of every preacher.

A church that would save the world from the
dominion and penalty of sin, and introduce it into
the fellowship and peace of God, that would
reform and purify society in all its diseased con-
ditions and bring in the kingdom of Heaven, must
know how to sing in the future as the church has
loved to sing in the victorious past, that old
eighteenth century hymn of unshaken confidence,

" How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in his excellent Word."

If there is no certainty of faith, that hymn by
George Keith must be discarded and expunged
from our hymn books, as a past superstition, and
its echoes only come down to us from a happier
time. " Interpreted in terms of modern doubt "
(a slight change in words, but possessing the old
meaning as often used), it would read.

You have no foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Laid up for your faith in his uncertain Word.

But we are assured that the faith of Christ's

30 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

true followers is much more precious to Him
than gold that perisheth, that the foundation of
God standeth sure, having this seal, the Lord
knoweth them that are his, and that the faith
once delivered to the saints, unchanged and reg-
nant, will continue to triumph over all error and
denial, as well as over all the changing theories
of so-called progressive thought. A faith that
has wrought such marvelous transformations in
human character and life, and has produced such
conspicuous results in moral sentiment, in legisla-
tion and government, in social customs and civi-
lization itself, has proved its divine origin, and
established its claim to be worthy of all accepta-
tion. It needs not to be exchanged, and cannot
be improved upon. It is to continue to be su-
preme in the realm of moral and religious thought.
As unfolded at the beginning, having upon it the
stamp of Heaven's mint, it is to dominate all
thinking, however modern, and to pass current to
the end of the world. Like its divine Author it
is the same yesterday, to-day and forever.

Principal Fairbairn says, " You will find many
a beautiful proverb in Seneca; you will get many
a fine ethical principle in Plato ; you will find in
Stoicism some of the most exalted precepts that
human ethics have ever known. But mark you
one thing, you will never discover that these ele-

CERTAINTY OF FAITH 31

vatcd the common life of man, . . . made the
bad good or the impure holy. Where they failed,
Christ succeeded with splendid, glorious success.
He made out of the very outcasts men that be-
came saints of God." The late Dr. James Orr,
to quote again from his able work on " The Chris-
tian View of God and the World," uses these
significant words: "I do not believe that the
Christian view is obsolete; that it is doomed to
go down like a faded constellation in the west
of the sky of humanity. I do not believe that
in order to preserve it, one single truth we have
been accustomed to see shining in that constella-
tion, will require to be withdrawn. The world
needs them all, and will one day acknowledge it.
It is not with a sense of failure, therefore, but
with a sense of triumph, that I see the progress
of the battle between faith and unbelief. I have
no fear that the conflict will issue in defeat. Like
the ark above the waters, Christ's religion will
ride in safety the waves of present-day unbelief,
as it has ridden the waves of unbelief in days gone
by, bearing in it the hopes of the future of hu-
manity."

CHAPTER 11

THE BIBLE, OUR GREAT EDUCATIONAL ASSET

THERE never was a time when the book or
books which we call " The Book," was so
much discussed as In recent years. Its origin,
composition, authorship, authenticity, inspiration,
authority, all these have been matters in constant
debate. The " higher criticism," a term which
is very misleading to those w^ho do not understand
its meaning, its scope, its limitations and its re-
sults, has done not a little to disturb the confidence
of many persons in the Word of God as an au-
thoritative revelation of truth. This discussion
was not unexpected. Wise leaders saw the
gathering clouds. President Henry G. Weston
said, some years before his death in 1909, " The
next great battle to be fought will be over the
divine origin and authority of the Bible." Men
began to issue publications with such titles as this,
" The Gospel for an Age of Doubt." Friends
and foes saw that the Bible was the Gibraltar of
the Christian religion. On this issue the battle
was joined. Dr. Weston lived to see his prophecy
fulfilled.

32

THE BIBLE 33

It should be said that the term " higher criti-
cism " denotes a kind of criticism, and not its
character or quality. It signifies the study of the
origin and authenticity of the books of the Bible,
and their relation to the facts of history as well
as to each other. There are critics and critics,
some destructive and others constructive. Presi-
dent E. G. Robinson said, " I am glad for the
existence of the ' higher criticism.' It is ap-
pointed of God like every other method of test-
ing the truth of Christianity, to bring that truth
more clearly to light." Unfortunately it has not
always had that effect. There has been, however,
of late a strong reaction In prominent circles in
favor of the evangelical faith. The adverse
criticisms had gone too far to carry the consent of
intelligent, thinking men, and numerous conjec-
tural opinions have been compelled to be aban-
doned by the light of fuller investigation and
modern discovery.

The testimony of the monuments which contain
contemporaneous records bearing upon the Old
Testament especially, and which though buried
In the sand for centuries have in the providence
of God been unearthed at a time when especially
needed, has given its unvarying confirmation to
the truthfulness of the Sacred Scriptures, and we
can await confidently further developments. Says

34 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Professor George Frederick Wright, an acknowl-
edged authority, " That this history should be
confirmed in so many cases and in such a remarka-
ble manner by monuments uncovered 3000 years
after their erection, can be nothing else than provi-
dential. Surely, God has seen to it that the fail-
ing faith of these later days should not be left to
grope in darkness. When the faith of many was
waning, and many heralds of truth were tempted
to speak with uncertain sound, the very stones
have cried out with a voice that only the deaf
could fail to hear."

Moreover, men have come to recognize more
fully than ever before the irresistible witness of
the Bible to its own claims, its transforming in-
fluence upon thought and literature, upon char-
acter and life, upon the development of the in-
dividual, the welfare of the community and the
progress of nations. Men have too long been
discussing " mint and anise and cummin," and are
turning now to the weightier matters of faith and
the fundamentals of the religious life and the
soul's salvation. Four facts need to be recog-
nized. The Bible is still here, and in the judg-
ment of the great body of Biblical scholars still
stands as " an impregnable rock." Christianity is
still here, with its authoritative sanctions, its holy
inspirations and its lofty ideals, unweakened and

THE BIBLE 35

untarnished. The Church of Christ is still here,
with a constantly widening influence and a con-
stantly increasing fellowship, Christ is still here,
with his imperative challenge to the faith, the
love and the supreme devotion of the world, de-
claring evermore, " All power is given unto me
in heaven and in earth," and sending out his
gracious invitatio,n which demands a courteous
response, " Come unto me."

Another fact should be recognized more than
it is wont to be, viz., the preservative influence
of the Bible. It is the Bible that has preserved
Christianity as a definite system of religion, with
its holy inspirations and lofty ideals, and saved
it from degenerating into a lifeless deism or some
form of natural religion, which neither satisfies
nor saves. It is the Bible that has preserved the
Church from decay and been to it its authorita-
tive standard of faith, and its mighty instrument
of conquest among men, sometimes calling it back
from gross departures to a simple spiritual faith.
It is the Bible that has kept living and vivid the
portrait of Jesus Christ in the world, and
preserved it from fading into an unreal and
powerless myth. Christ is enshrined in the Bible,
not as a gem in a beautiful setting, but as a living,
breathing Presence, imparting life to its sacred
pages and sharing with its truth his own immor-

36 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

tality. So long as Christ is its tenant, men need
not fear for the ark of the Lord.

The purpose of this paper is didactic, not con-
troversial, to indicate the important and neces-
sary place which this Bible, of which I have been
speaking, must hold in any complete educational
system, to suggest its supreme value as a part of
our educational equipment. The Bible is con-
fessedly the most unique and conspicuous book in
the English language or in any language. It has
been called " The greatest English classic." Sir
Matthew Hale, Chief Justice of England, de-
clared, " There is no book like the Bible for ex-
cellent learning, wisdom and use." John Quincy
Adams confessed, " The first and almost the only
book deserving attention is the Bible." And
Professor O. M. Mitchell, the devout Astronomer
and patriotic General, expressed his belief that
" The most wonderful volume in existence is, be-
yond a doubt, the Bible." These testimonials,
and other similar ones almost without number,
from men eminent in every calling and profession
in life, give to the Bible the supreme place in our
literature, and in the mental and moral training
of the race, a Book to be sacredly honored, to be
devoutly studied and to be passionately loved.
No other attainments can render a knowledge of
this Book superfluous. It forms a necessary part

THE BIBLE 37

of a liberal education. No man can claim to be
a truly educated man who has not made himself
familiar with the contents of this Book, and
learned the lessons which it inculcates.

There are five methods of studying the Bible,
viz., the historical, the biographical, the literary,
the ethical and the religious. All are important,
but all are not equally important. But all are
necessary to the complete mastery of the Book.

I. The Bible contains the history of a remarka-
ble people, called by way of distinction " God's
ancient people "; of the development of its moral
and religious life, of its solitary monotheistic
faith, of its relations to other peoples friendly
and hostile, of its survival under conquest and
exile, and of the strange preparation in it and
evolution out of it, of a religion which bears the
name of " Christianity," which has proved to be
the mightiest force in our modern civilization, and
is destined to overcome all other religious faiths,
and eventually to rule the world. Professor Ben-
jamin W. Bacon of Yale University, speaking of
Christianity as we know it, characterizes it in
these words, *' The religion of humanity which
it has become, and the world-religion which it is
destined to be." All this is included in the his-
torical study of the Jewish people, which inhabited
a narrow strip of territory lying on the eastern

38 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

border of the Mediterranean Sea, a territory
which though narrow and insignificant when com-
pared with the great empires of the old world,
was the thoroughfare of the nations, and whose
history by reason of its connection with other
lands, as well as by reason of its far reaching in-
fluence, is an integral part of universal history.

History is a legitimate study and forms an
essential part in an educational curriculum. No
education is complete and worthy of the name,
which does not include a knowledge of Greece
and Rome, of Egypt and Babylonia and Assyria,
and even of the great empires of the farther East,
India and Japan and China. Modern education
lays a tremendous emphasis upon the study of the
classic languages of Greece and Rome, and the
history of the peoples who spoke them. Should
it not give an equal place to the study of the his-
tory of Israel and the land of Syria, which have
had a mightier influence at least upon the life and
civilization of the West than Greece and Rome
combined? It is said, as if by way of explana-
tion, that the Greeks had a genius for art, the
Romans for law and government, and the Jews
for religion. That is probably an explanation
which does not wholly explain. But religion is
as much a matter of history as art and government,
and its study is certainly as broadening and illumi-

THE BIBLE 39

nating, and as helpful to life and character,
whether personal or national. Art found per-
manent expression in architecture and the beauty
of sculptured form. Law found permanent ex-
pression in the Roman Pandects, a digest of the
decisions and opinions of the Roman jurists made
in the sixth century by order of the Emperor Jus-
tinian. And religion found permanent expression
in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, which have
molded the thinking and conduct of men and
the life of nations until now, and never more
powerfully than at the present time. All this is
history. To study the Bible historically is to be-
come familiar not only with the external events
of the Hebrew nation, marvelous as some of them
were, but with its spirit, its genius and its faith,
and with the beginnings of the religion founded
by Him of whom Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
says, " He is the purest among the mighty, the
mightiest among the pure, who with his pierced
hand has raised empires from their foundations,
turned the stream of history from its old channel,
and still continues to rule and guide the ages."
Inevitably the study of this ancient history will find
much about it that will justify the term " sacred,"
which is uniformly applied to it, much that will
be unmistakable evidence of the presence and pur-
pose, Interposition and guidance of the supreme

40 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Ruler of the universe. Dr. William S. Rainsford
has well said, " We owe much to the beauty-
loving Greeks, we owe much to the law-making
Romans; but more, far more do we owe to the
God-loving Jews."

The following paragraph is taken from " The
American Mind " by that eminent litterateur.
Professor Bliss Perry, who discloses a just insight
into the forces, subtle and complex, which have
produced our Western civilization. " For that
matter, what was, and is, that one Book — to the
eyes of the Protestant seventeenth century infalli-
ble and inexpressibly sacred — but the most potent
and universal commerce of ideas and spirit, pass-
ing from the Orient through Greek and Roman
civilization, into the mind and heart of western
Europe and America?

'Oh, East is East, and West is West,
And ne'er the twain shall meet,'

declares a confident poet of to-day. But East
and West met long ago in the matchless phrases
translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin
into the English Bible; and the heart of the East
there answers to the heart of the West, as in
water face answereth to face. That the coloniz-
ing Englishmen of the seventeenth century were
Hebrews in spiritual culture, and heirs of Greece

THE BIBLE 41

and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo-Saxon in
blood, is one of the marvels of the history of
civilization, and it is one of the basal facts in the
intellectual life of the United States to-day."

2. The second method of studying the Bible
is the biographical. This is nearly related to the
historical, for biography is largely history per-
sonified. Human history is the story of human
lives, singly or in groups. Great movements in
the annals of the world are connected with the
men who are denominated great leaders, kings,
generals, statesmen, reformers and philanthro-
pists, and are revelations of their genius, their
character, their ambitions, their aspirations, their
ability, their convictions and their personal traits.
To know history is to know men, their activity,
their influence, their successes or failures, their
victories or defeats. Educators to-day are em-
phasizing the v^alue of the study of biography
as one of the most attractive, inspiring, character-
building branches of learning. Our libraries are
being filled with the lives of those who have been
really or supposedly great among their fellows,
and worthy of permanent record, who have made
conspicuous attainments, illustrated great princi-
ples and served noble causes. Even fiction ac-
quires its principal charm, not from its literary
style, but from the imaginary characters which it

42 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

portrays, and the living incidents which make up
its chapters. It is a real world into which the
Bible introduces us, with inhabitants like ourselves,
intensely human, bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh, living our lives, sharing our experiences of
temptation and trial, of joy and sorrow, and
looking forward to the same destiny. It is not
a world of myths and unrealities. It is no fic-
tion. Reality impresses us everywhere. As an-
other has said, " There is no other book which
reflects so many sides and aspects of human ex-
perience as the Bible, and this fact alone would
suffice to give it a worldwide interest and make it
popular. Born in the East and clothed in
Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the
ways of all the world with familiar feet, and en-
ters land after land to find its own everywhere."
It is humanity's book and makes its appeal to every
age and nation.

The Bible is throbbing with human life. It Is
not simply a book of philosophy however sublime,
nor of unlllustrated moral and religious truth. It
Is crowded with the names and deeds of men and
women who were prominent in their time, and
will be prominent in all time; It is alive with char-
acters which are worthy of devout study and of
perpetual imitation. This fact constitutes its re-
sistless attraction and no small part of its perma-

THE BIBLE 43

nent value. The world cannot afford to forget
Enoch, the man who knew how to " walk with
God and was not, for God took him," or Abra-
ham the man of sublime faith and the founder of
a great nation, " who looked with clear vision for
a city which hath foundations whose builder and
maker is God," or Moses, the father of history
and matchless leader of his people, " who chose
rather to suffer affliction with the people of God
than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season,"
or Joseph, the heroic and incorruptible official,
or David, the royal singer, whose Psalms, born
out of his own experience, will express the deepest
experiences of the humble, the devout, the true,
the God-fearing in all the ages, or Elijah, the
prophet of fire and defender of the one true God,
or Isaiah, the magnificent preacher of righteous-
ness and sweet voiced prophet of the coming Mes-
siah and the glory of his kingdom, or any of the
other prophets and servants of God who stood for
justice and humanity, and whose messages are find-
ing fresh application to-day for the rectification
of the oppressions and wrongs of our social con-
ditions, heroes and martyrs, a great company,
some of whose names are written in the eleventh
chapter of Hebrews, the Westminster Abbey of
the ancient Church, men " who through faith sub-
dued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained

44 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

promises, stopped the mouths of lions, . . . were
stoned, sawn asunder, tempted, slain with the
sword, . . . being destitute, afflicted, tormented,
not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain
a better resurrection, of whom the world was not
worthy." Surely, to live in such company and
look upon such lives is to live in the heroic age
of the world, and be lifted up out of the narrow-
ness and littleness of the ordinary, selfish, hum-
drum existence.

No more can the world afford to forget Peter,
the impulsive, fickle, steadfast, lion-hearted apostle
and martyr, or Paul, the persecutor, then the
pioneer missionary and founder of churches and
mighty teacher, who laid his frail body and
vigorous intellect without reserve upon the altar
of his new found faith, or John, who once a son
of thunder, became the devout mystic and the
apostle of love, and was admitted into the inner
chamber of his Master's person and spirit, or
Stephen, the proto-martyr under the Christian dis-
pensation, who when the cruel stones were crush-
ing the life out of him, had a vision of his ascended
Lord, to whom he committed his departing spirit,
and the angels had a vision of the Christ-spirit
dwelling in him, as he prayed for his murderers,
that their sin might not be laid to their charge,
and indeed there was a threefold vision, for his

THE BIBLE 45

murderers looked upon his shining face as it had
been the face of an angel. And who can afford
to forget the Master himself, who, regarded as
a merely human being, a man among men, stood
upon the very pinnacle of moral excellence, pos-
sessing in Himself all beauty, symmetry, harmony,
completeness and perfection of life, the one abso-
lute illustration of genuine manhood for all the
ages to the end of time, whose life Carlyle calls
" a perfect ideal poem " and whose person " the
greatest of all heroes"; with whom Rousseau
says " Socrates was not to be compared," whom
Goethe calls " the divine man," " the pattern and
model of humanity," and of whom Renan speaks
as " the incomparable man," and adds " what-
ever may be the surprises of the future Jesus will
never be surpassed. His worship will grow
young without ceasing, his legend will call forth
tears without end, his sufferings will melt the
noblest hearts, and all ages will proclaim, that
among the sons of men, there is none born greater
than Jesus." When we find unbelievers employ-
ing such unqualified language in describing the
character of the man, Christ Jesus, we need not
be surprised to hear Dr. Philip Schaff, a devout
and learned disciple, speaking of Him as " over-
flowing with the purest love to men, free from
every sin and error, innocent and holy, teaching

46 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

and practicing all virtues in perfect harmony, de-
v-oted solely and uniformly to the noblest ends,
sealing the purest life with the sublimest death,
and ever acknowledged since as the one and only
perfect Model of goodness and holiness." It is
well to remember that all evolution in character
is evolution backward, towards the one flawless
Example and Model for all mankind.

Is biography worth while in a system of educa-
tion? Is it true that

" Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime"?

Is familiarity with noble examples of men who
have been consecrated to truth and righteousness,
to God and humanity, inspiring and helpful to
right living? Does it have an important place
in mental training and moral discipline? Can it
be placed side by side, as an educational influence
and aid to character and culture, with an acquaint-
ance with many languages, living and dead, and
the reasonings of human philosophy, and the facts
of natural science? Does fellowship with those
who have " dealt justly, and loved mercy, and
walked humbly before God," who have illustrated
the higher manhood and served their generation
acceptably, stimulate and broaden, strengthen and
uplift, in a word, educate and lead out the mind

THE BIBLE 47

to larger possibilities and loftier endeavors?
Then, where can be found nobler and more in-
spiring biographies, examples more worthy of
imitation, lives whose fellowship would be more
valuable than those recorded in the pages of the
Bible? The saintly Dr. Edward Payson, of
blessed memory, spoke of the companionships in
the Bible in this manner: " By opening this
volume we may at any time walk in the garden of
Eden with Adam, sit in the ark with Noah, share
the hospitality or witness the faith of Abraham,
ascend the mount of God with Moses, unite in
the secret devotions of David, or listen to the
eloquent and impassioned address of Paul. Nay,
more; we may here converse with Him who spake
as never man spake, participate with the just made
perfect in the employment and happiness of
Heaven, and enjoy sweet communion with the
Father of our spirits through his Son Jesus Christ.
Such is the society to which the Scriptures intro-
duce us, such the examples which they present for
our imitation,"

The following apt quotation is taken from " Re-
ligion as Life " by President Henry Churchill
King. " Just because the method of life includes,
as everywhere requisite, fellowship, men are
driven to find the great sources of life, short of
God himself, in the most rewarding personalities

48 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

of the moral and religious sphere, and so to give
special place to the great line of prophetic seers
of the spiritual, culminating in Jesus."

3. A third method of studying the Bible is the
literary method. The Bible, it has been affirmed
without contradiction, *' holds a place of pre-
eminence in the republic of letters." It is not
only " part and parcel of the human story," but
it is part and parcel of the world's literature.
Not only in elevation and sublimity of thought,
but in simplicity and beauty, dignity and charm
of expression, it is not only unsurpassed, but is
without a parallel among the myriads of volumes
that crowd each other on library shelves, and more
than they all together, our English version has in-
fluenced the thinking and literary style of the au-
thors of books that have won recognition and any
degree of permanence during the three hundred
years since its production. John Richard Green,
the historian, declares, " As a mere literary monu-
ment, the English of the Bible remains the noblest
example of the English tongue, while its perpetual
use made it from the instant of its appearance the
standard of our language." Macaulay, in his
" Essay on Dryden," characterizes the English Bi-
ble as " a book which, if everything else in our
language should perish, would alone suffice to
show the extent of its beauty and power." Pro-

THE BIBLE 49

fessor George P. Marsh, an unquestioned au-
thority, expresses his conviction that " Tyndale's
translation of the New Testament has exerted a
more marked influence upon English philology
than any other native work between the ages of
Chaucer and Shakespeare." Indeed, he goes so
far as to affirm that " the English Bible has made
the English language." It would not be difficult
to fill a good sized volume with similar testimonies
as to the dominant character and molding influ-
ence of our Scriptures upon the literature and lan-
guage of English-speaking peoples.

A short time ago the New York " Nation "
quoted from a European journal as follows:
" The philosophies, the literatures, the arts and
the languages themselves of Western civilization
have been nourished in large part by the Bible.
The Biblical tradition impregnates all of our
fashions of thinking and speaking. A man totally
unacquainted with sacred history would go through
the world as if deaf and blind. A people that
loses familiarity with the Bible is exiled from its
spiritual and intellectual fatherhood, and becomes
a band of outlaws."

It will be remembered that Tyndale's version
of the Bible (about 1534) which flowered into the
version of 161 1, the most splendid piece of Eng-
lish of all the versions, was based upon previous

50 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

translations, going back to Wycliffe's (about
1384). It will also be remembered that the cen-
tury in which the King James version was com-
pleted and published, lying between 1550 and
1650, " gave birth to more men," to quote from
Professor T. Harwood Pattison, " who were
destined to great literary distinction than has any
other period of equal length in English history."
It is only necessary to recall the names of Raleigh
and Spenser and Hooker, of Jeremy Taylor and
Robert South, of Izaak Walton and Lord Bacon
and George Herbert, of Leighton and Owen and
Baxter, and above all of Shakespeare and Milton
and Bunyan. Among these brilliant luminaries
of that brilliant century the Bible shines as the
bright, particular planet. As a literary orb Cow-
per's language is true of it,

" A glory gilds the sacred page,

Majestic like the sun,
It gives a light to every age,

It gives, but borrov?s none."

Indeed, it may be said that the chief element
that gives elevation and attractiveness and perma-
nence to contemporaneous literature, as well as
subsequent, is the infusion of the thought, kinship
with the style and allusions to the incidents and
imagery of the Bible. Shakespeare is sometimes
said to be " saturated " with the Bible, so fre-

THE BIBLE 51

quent are its references to the characters and
phraseology of Scripture, while Milton and Bun-
yan often seem little more than paraphrases.

It would be easy to cite the names of men who
have been distinguished in the fields of history
and science, statesmanship and literature, who
have borne glad testimony to their reverence for
the Bible and its creative and formative influence
upon their thought and literary style, or whose
writings have plainly revealed the master-spirit at
whose feet they have patiently and admiringly
sat, and whose lessons they have not failed to im-
bibe, for it is evermore true that a man's speech
often betrayeth him. In addition to Macaulay
and Green in the realm of history, already men-
tioned, we think of Froude and Milman and Free-
man, of Bancroft and Motley and Prescott and of
Washington Irving, who confessed, " I think I
have waked a good many sleeping fancies by the
reading of a chapter in Isaiah." In the realm of
science, we think of Sir Isaac Newton and David
Brewster, of Sir Humphry Davy and Faraday,
who expounded the Bible every Sunday in the
meeting of an obscure religious sect, and of our
own Agassiz and Gray and Dana, who were dili-
gent students of the Bible, and even of Professor
Huxley, who could not withhold his testimony to
the educational value of the Bible, for he said:

52 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

" For three centuries this book has been woven into
the life of all that is best and noblest in English
history; it has become the national epic of Britain,
and is as familiar to noble and simple, from John
O'Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and
Tasso once were to the Italians." In the realm
of statesmanship we think of Cromwell and
Shaftesbury, of Bright and Gladstone, whom their
familiarity with the Bible qualified for their high
service, and of Washington, who associated " the
pure and benign light of Revelation " with " re-
finement of manners and growing liberality of
sentiment," and Webster, who ascribed the dig-
nity and stateliness of his speech to his intimate
acquaintance with the Old Testament prophets,
and Lincoln, who had almost no other text book
than the Bible, and whose classic and immortal
utterances glow with its beauty and spirit. In
the realm of prose literature we think of Wal-
ter Scott, who called for " the Book " in his
last hour, saying " there was only one Book,"
of Dickens and Thackeray, in whose writings
hundreds of Biblical allusions are found, of
Ruskin, who paid an affectionate tribute to his
Bible and to his mother, who with gentle authority
early introduced him to its purity of thought and
of language, of Matthew Arnold and Walter
Pater and A. C. Benson, of Hawthorne and

THE BIBLE 53

Emerson, to speak of no others in the long list
of prose writers on both sides of the Atlantic.
And in the realm of modern poetry we think
of Cowper and Wordsworth, of Tennyson and
Browning and Edwin Arnold, of Longfellow
and Whittier and Lowell and Bryant, all of whom
drank deep at this pure Pierian spring, and have
imparted their inspiration to their own genera-
tion, and will impart it to the generations that
follow.

A few personal testimonies of superior weight
will emphasize the literary value of the Bible as
an educational asset. Mr. Charles A. Dana,
the successful American journalist, in an address
at Union College to students who might be con-
templating entering upon that profession, said:
" There are some books that are absolutely in-
dispensable, . . . and of all these the most in-
dispensable, the most useful, the one whose knowl-
edge is most effective, is the Bible. There is no
book from which more valuable lessons can be
learned. I am considering it now not as a re-
ligious book, but as a manual of utility, of pro-
fessional preparation and professional use for a
journalist. There is perhaps no book whose style
is more suggestive and more instructive, from
which you learn more directly that sublime sim-
plicity which never exaggerates, which recounts

54 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

the greatest event with solemnity of course, but
without sentimentality or affectation; none which
you open with such confidence and lay down with
such reverence; there is no book like the Bible."
Froude, the historian, speaking of the translation
of Tyndale, says, " The peculiar genius which
breathes through it, the mingled tenderness and
majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural
grandeur, unequaled, unapproached in the at-
tempted improvements of modern scholars, are
all here, and bear the impress of one man, and
that man William Tyndale." Sir Edwin Arnold,
of international reputation in the field of letters,
frankly acknowledges in answer to the query,
" What I owe to the Bible? " " My short reply
would be ' everything.' My long reply, to be
sufficiently serious and comprehensive, would run
into reams of paper. But if, as I suppose, I am
addressed as a man of letters, I will simply say
that I owe my education as a writer more to the
Bible than to any other hundred books that could
be named. It is the grandest possible school of
style, letting alone all that it must ever be on the
moral and spiritual side. I had read the Bible
through and through three times over before I
was twelve years of age."

Professor Hoare, of Balliol College, is quoted
as follows, " The Bible is accepted as a literary

THE BIBLE 55

masterpiece, as the noblest and most beautiful
book in the world, which has exercised an incal-
culable influence upon religion, upon manners,
upon literature and upon character." Professor
Simon Greenleaf, once Professor in Harvard
University, has expressed his deliberate verdict
in these words, " In sublimity of thought, in
grandeur of conception, in purity and elevation
of moral principle, in the practical wisdom of its
teachings, and the universality and perpetuity of
their application, and above all, in the high and
important character of its themes, the Holy Bible
is not even approached by any human composi-
tion." Theodore Parker left behind him this
honest judgment, " View it in what light we may,
the Bible is a very surprising phenomenon. It
is read of a Sabbath in all the ten thousand pul-
pits of our land. In all the temples of Christen-
dom is its voice lifted up, week by week. The
sun never sets on its gleaming page. It goes
equally to the cottage of the plain man, and the
palace of the king. It is woven into the litera-
ture of the scholar, and colors the talk of the
street. ... It blesses us when we are born, gives
names to half of Christendom, rejoices with us,
has sympathy for our mourning, and tempers our
grief to finer issues. It is the better part of our
sermons. It lifts man above himself; our best

S6 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

of uttered prayers are In its storied speech, where-
with our fathers and the patriarchs prayed." Dr.
Andrew P. Peabody, formerly a Professor in Har-
vard University, declared, " Our Bible is still the
key to the best English diction, and by conversance
with it our children are made familiar with their
own language in a purer form than any other
which can be placed before them." And John
Stuart Mill adds his testimony in these words,
" The Bible and Shakespeare have done more
than any other books for the English language, in-
troducing into the soul of it such grand ideas ex-
pressed with such sublime simplicity."

Such consenting and unanimous testimony from
the great world of letters, from which there is no
discordant note, gives to the English Bible not
only an exalted place, but the supreme place in
its influence upon the literary product of English-
speaking people. In it we have narrative and
parable, poetry and song, oratory and drama, de-
nunciation and promise, moral precept, theological
statement and glowing prophecy, all expressed
with a simplicity and lucidity, beauty and charm,
dignity and sublimity, force and impressiveness,
unsurpassed, not to say unequaled. If familiarity
with literature is a necessary part of a liberal
education, and if the highest literature will in-
evitably tend to cultivate the noblest think-

THE BIBLE 57

ing, as well as furnish the best training in
the use of words and forms of expression,
the student who is ambitious to achieve ex-
cellence for himself, and even to read intelli-
gently the classics in his own tongue, must give
himself diligently and conscientiously to that Book
which, as a living x'Xmerican educator has recently
said, " has had an immeasurable effect upon the
whole body of English literature, and has shaped
not only the thought of the greatest writers and
orators, but also their phraseology and style, who
expect their readers to know the meanings of
the scriptural allusions with which their works
abound."

It is to be feared that our educational system,
from the lowest grade to the highest, is culpably
neglecting a chief source of culture, and that the
neglect of home training and the changed method
of Sunday School instruction, which requires little
of the language of the Bible to be committed to
memory, are giving to us a generation, whose cul-
ture Is greatly Inferior to that of the fathers, and
which Is disqualified from appreciating the riches
of our literary inheritance. The results of tests
which Professors in colleges have submitted to
their students In order to ascertain their ability to
understand Scriptural allusions In our standard

58 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

literature, would be amusing, if they were not so
painful and deplorable,

4. The fourth method of studying the Bible,
and a method vastly more important than those
which have been considered, is the ethical method.
More valuable than the informing and training of
the mind and the cultivation of the literary taste
and style, is the inculcation of moral principle and
the development of personal character. It can
be safely said that no book in our language or in
any language can be compared with the Bible as
a moral dynamic. For its exalted moral teach-
ings, for its principles which should control con-
duct and life, for its inspired guidance for man
in all his relations, the Bible furnishes the abso-
lutely perfect rule. All ethical systems have
value as they are conformed to this standard.
President Francis Wayland, who acquired a na-
tional reputation, not only as a college adminis-
trator but as a teacher of Moral Science, gave ut-
terance to his high appreciation of the moral in-
fluence of the Scriptures in these positive words,
" That the truths of the Bible have the power of
awakening an intense moral feeling in man under
every variety of character, learned or ignorant,
civilized or savage; that they make bad men good,
and send a pulse of healthful feeling through all
the domestic, civil and social relations; that they

THE BIBLE 59

teach men to love right and hate wrong, and to
seek each other's welfare, as the children of one
common Parent; that they control the baleful pas-
sions of the human heart, and thus make men
proficient in the science of self-government; and
finally, that they teach men to aspire after a con-
formity to a Being of infinite holiness, and fill
them with hopes infinitely more purifying, more
exalted, more suited to their nature, than any other
which this world has ever known, are facts as in-
controvertible as the laws of philosophy or the
demonstrations of mathematics." And Thomas
Jefferson frankly declared, " Of all the systems of
morality, ancient or modern, which have come
under my observation, none appear to me so pure
as that of Jesus." Again he said, " I have always
said, and always will say, that the studious
perusal of the Sacred Volume will make better
citizens, better fathers and better husbands."

All ethnic religions have had their moral teach-
ings. It has been said that it is not difficult to
find single threads in these religions which faintly
suggest the cloth of gold found in the ethical
precepts of the Gospels. The teachings of Con-
fucius, for example, contain what Is sometimes
spoken of as " the golden rule," which reads,
" Do not do unto others what you would not have
them do to you," a mere negative prohibition.

6o THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

which would produce a race of ciphers, and would
justify a man in finding his chief cause for grati-
tude to God, in that he had done no harm in the
world, but is in striking contrast with the positive
injunction of Christianity, which would fill life
with a benevolent helpfulness and an abounding
service. Meroz was cursed because it came not
to the help of the Lord. There were seven thou-
sand men in Israel, who had not bowed the knee
to Baal, but their virtue was a negative quantity.
They did nothing to make themselves publicly
known as on the Lord's side, or to comfort and
support his prophet. It is impossible to construct
a useful life and a worthy and acceptable char-
acter out of mere negatives. The doom of the
final judgment, as foretold by Christ, was pro-
nounced upon those who " did it not," while eter-
nal blessedness is to be the reward of the actively
obedient and sympathetically helpful to God's
needy ones. But the so-called moralities of other
religions are worse than negative; they are crude
and often offensive in comparison with the pure
and lofty teachings of the Bible. A comparison
between the moral teachings of the Bible and the
philosophic ethics of Greece and Rome has been
frequently made, and discloses but slight resem-
blances, and at the same time enormous contrasts.
Romanes pronounces the latter often " absurd "

THE BIBLE 6i

In the judgment of reason and " shocking to the
moral sense."

It is true that there is progress in the Scrip-
tures in their ethical teachings, as well as in their
doctrinal teachings. There is a basis of truth for
the statement of Dr. Newman Smyth, though it
is put so strongly that by many persons it is cer-
tain to be misunderstood, and leave an utterly er-
roneous impression. He says, " The morality of
the Old Testament was incomplete, in many re-
spects defective, and neither in its outward sanc-
tions nor its inward motives a final morality for
man; yet it was real morality, striving towards
better things, growing from a genuine ethical root
into the light and fruitfulness of the coming sea-
son of divine grace. The method of the morality
of the Old Testament is educational and progres-
sive; its whole character Is preparatory and proph-
etic." Such language inevitably leads to a false
underestimate of the character of the moral teach-
ings of God's ancient Scriptures. Whatever may
have been their Incompleteness, they had upon
them the stamp of the divine approval and author-
ship, and were fully sufficient to lead men to obedi-
ence and fellowship with God, and to a godly
life. The legislation of Moses In the matter of
divorce, referred to In the Gospels, was not, as is
sometimes supposed. In favor of a loosening of

62 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

the marriage bond, and an instance of immoral
legislation, but it was for the purpose of tighten-
ing and protecting the marriage bond, and making
divorce more difficult, while at the same time the
original primal relationship, which made of twain
one flesh, not to be put asunder, was reasserted in
all its sanctity. No intelligent reader of the Old
Testament can dispute the fact that the whole
tendency and drift of its teachings were positively
and only ethical. They produced saints, not only
in name but in reality, saints who feared God and
loved his commandments, who hated iniquity, who
" wrought righteousness and obtained promises."
An eminent American preacher, when called
to preach before a University audience, chose for
his text the words of the prophet Micah, " What
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and
to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God,"
and he found in them the whole duty of man, his
duty towards God and his duty towards his fel-
low man. They contained in his judgment a
complete moral code, with no incompleteness and
no defectiveness. Men were exhorted in the
ante-Christian era to " mark the perfect man and
behold the upright, for the end of that man is
peace," implying that the moral light of that olden
time was sufficient to produce upright and godly
examples worthy of study and imitation. Again

THE BIBLE 63

it was said, " Thou desirest truth in the inward
parts, and in the hidden part thou shalt make me
to know wisdom," and again, " Who shall ascend
into the hill of the Lord, who shall stand in his
holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure
heart." Inward purity and outward obedience,
inward motives that were holy and outward sanc-
tions approved of God, were alike demanded in
the accepted worshiper. How often were men
told by God's servants that He desired not sacri-
fice, and was not pleased even with thousands of
rams, with the empty, even excessive observance of
an outward ritual, but with a broken spirit and a
contrite heart. These were God's delight. Who,
even in our day, has a deeper insight into the true
nature of sin, and the nature of spiritual worship,
than that Old Testament saint who under the deep
consciousness of his guilt, cried out, " Against
Thee, Thee only have I sinned and done this evil
in thy sight,'' and looked above his sin as a mere
violation of human moral law, and saw in it a blow
aimed at the moral government of the universe,
and at the known will of Him who sits upon Its
throne? Such a conception of the guilt and na-
ture of sin is not too frequent even in this morally
enlightened age. A moral system that had em-
blazoned upon its central page and clothed with
divine authority and supernatural sanctity, the ten

64 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

great commandments, including reverence for the
one personal God, the prohibition of all substi-
tutes in his place, of whatever kind, the One,
whose unquestioned prerogative it is to dispense
justice to all who hate Him, and mercy to those
who love Him ; whose name is to be sacredly hon-
ored and adored; a holy regard for his Sabbath;
the sanctity of parental authority and the family
life; a conscientious respect for the life, the rights,
the property, the good name of all men, not only
the forbidding of graft, oppression, unchastity,
untruthfulness, robbery, but even of the Inward
coveting of whatever is not one's own, must have
had in it elements of permanence and universal
application. When men boast that they have
outgrown the Old Testament teachings and are
living in a new and enlightened period of the
world's history, it may be replied confidently that
there is abundant evidence all about us that the
world has not yet lived up to the moral standard
proclaimed by the prophets and teachers of the
Jewish nation.

It should be added that those teachings were
preeminently social in their application, and had
to do with the community life and the national
life and conditions as well as with the life of the
Individual. Modern conditions are directing the
attention of preachers anew to the fearless utter-

THE BIBLE 6s

anccs of their God-called and God-inspired pred-
ecessors, which are as applicable and necessary
at the present time as they were in the days of
old, indeed which seem as if they were spoken
especially for our day, when conditions are strik-
ingly analogous. No message is more modern
than this one of ancient times, that the prosperity
of the nation is dependent upon the righteousness
of the nation. " Righteousness exalteth a nation,
but sin is a reproach to any people." No prog-
ress has been made beyond the old condition of a
nation's glory, when " Mercy and truth are met
together, and righteousness and peace have kissed
each other." It is as true of the Old Testament
in the twentieth century as it was in the first cen-
tury that " Every Scripture inspired of God is
also profitable for teaching, for correction, for
reproof, for instruction which is in righteousness,
that the man of God may be complete, furnished
completely unto every good work."

The striking language of Matthew Arnold, In
" Literature and Dogma," cannot be forgotten
or disputed, — " As long as the world lasts all
who want to make progress in righteousness will
come to Israel for inspiration as to the people
who have had the sense of righteousness most
glowing and strongest, and In hearing and reading
the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for

66 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

conduct will find a glow and a force they could
find nowhere else. As well Imagine a man with
a sense for sculpture not cultivating It by the help
of the remains of Greek art, or a man with a
sense for poetry not cultivating it by the help of
Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a sense
for conduct not cultivating It by the help of the
Bible. . . . Greece was the lifter up to the
nations of the banner of art and science, as Israel
was the lifter up of the banner of righteousness."
This discussion of the character of the moral
teachings of the Old Testament does not Imply
that Christ has not given to morality a fuller,
deeper and more spiritual meaning. He de-
nounced the formalism, the shallowness, the In-
sincerity of his time. He demolished the accre-
tions and misinterpretations, which In the degen-
erate years had attached themselves to the rules
of conduct and of life. But He came not to de-
stroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfill, not only
to fulfill the Old Testament types and Messianic
predictions pertaining to Himself, but to fill out
In distinct and visible outline, by his teaching and
his example, the moral and spiritual command-
ments which his generation had received from
the fathers. The Old Testament does not stand
alone. It finds Its Illumination and Illustration
In the New. As has been said, " the New Is

THE BIBLE 67

concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in
the New." There is no contradiction, but a ful-
lillment, a rounding out, a completion, a new and
deeper spiritual emphasis. Christ laid special
emphasis not upon the act, but upon the spirit,
which lies behind the act, and may never find
expression in outward conduct. Hatred is mur-
der, and lust is adultery. Morality is too often
regarded as a mere matter of conduct. The
moral man, it is thought, is the man who abstains
from wrongdoing, who is guilty of no violation
of legal enactment or moral precept. That is as
far as the judgment of men can go with its narrow
vision. But Christ teaches that there is immo-
rality of the soul, which lies beneath the gaze of
man's eyes, which only the eye of God can see.
This is the true standard of judgment and of life.
Ordinary morality may make better citizens in
the Republic, but it does not go deep enough to
qualify for citizenship in the kingdom of God.

The moral code of Christ may be said to be
contained in the Sermon on the Mount, which
men who little comprehend its searching, pene-
trating, revealing character, sometimes say " is
good enough Gospel for me," thinking thereby
to declare their independence of the Gospel, which
contains a sacrificial death and the offer of par-
doning grace. If the Sermon on the Mount is

68 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

the only Gospel which the world possesses, there
is no hope for it, for it is, in very truth, a new
and resplendent law of life, which while it reveals
Christ's perfect standard, reveals at the same
time the utter insufficiency of man's conformity and
obedience. It is a new schoolmaster to lead every
thoughtful man to the cross of Christ, and trust
in his perfect obedience and offer of eternal life.
It makes a demand for virtues which are not wont
to be comprised in the world's category, and pro-
claims the universal law of perfect, required man-
hood, and at the same time discloses " the touch-
stone of every social and political order." Pov-
erty of spirit, meaning a humble consciousness of
spiritual need, penitence and meekness of soul,
hunger and thirst after righteousness or justice,
which means a passion for the doing of God's
will in heart and life, mercifulness like the divine,
including compassion as well as forgiveness, in-
ward purity which allies a man to God, and con-
tains the assurance of eternal fellowship with Him,
the ability to live at peace with all men, and to
persuade all men to live at peace with one an-
other, avoiding all oppression and wrong, and so
to be the sons of God, and help to realize the ful-
fillment of the angelic prophecy, when the only
begotten Son of God was born into the world, and
joy in the midst of persecution bravely endured

THE BIBLE 69

for righteousness' sake, — these, these are the re-
quired credentials of the subjects of Christ's king-
dom, these are the beatitudes of those who would
be his followers, these are the characteristics of
those who would live according to the standard
of his moral teachings. And then He goes on
to enjoin upon his hearers to be " perfect as God
is perfect," and closes his sermon with the one
just criterion of all life, " by their fruits they
should be known." It is no wonder that the peo-
ple were astonished at his teaching, and wondered
as He ceased and came down from the mount.

John Stuart Mill boldly affirmed: *' Not even
now could it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to
find a better translation of the rule of virtue from
the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor
so to live that Christ would approve of our life."

This, then, briefly was Christ's ethical standard
of life and character, the like of which the world
had never seen, and of which the moralists and
philosophers among men had never even dreamed.
And yet Christ left to the world not a code of
morals simply, but a life. He illustrated his pure
and sublime moral teaching by his perfect ex-
ample. He lived what He taught, and taught
by his life, and to his example all human life is
to be conformed. All students who aspire to
know that which is highest and best in character

70 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

and life, and to realize it in themselves and in the
world, must sit at the feet of " the Lord and Mas-
ter of us all," and as they catch his spirit, and
imitate his example, and walk in his footsteps,
civilization is to be advanced, social evils are to
be eradicated, social conditions are to be made
perfect, righteousness and peace are to kiss each
other, and the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven
is to be brought in. Well has John Morley
spoken of " the volcanic elements that slumber in
the Sermon on the Mount."

Rev. J. Bradford Thomson, in his volume en-
titled " Central Evidences of Christianity," de-
clares, " But the fact is that the ethics of Chris-
tianity did not come from man but to man, that
the Lord Jesus professed a divine authority for
his revelations, and that, after all, what gives
Christian morality its true power is its actual em-
bodiment in Christ Himself, and the special mo-
tive to aspiration and obedience which He fur-
nished in his voluntary devotion to the cross for
the salvation of mankind." Again he says, " The
New Testament is a trumpet-call, summoning all
who acknowledge its authority to aspiration,
progress and eminence in goodness." A poet has
finely expressed the magnetic power of the teach-
ing and life of Christ in these lines:

THE BIBLE 71

"Thou art the great completion of my soul,

The blest fulfillment of its deepest need;
When self-surrendered to thy dear control,
It enters into liberty indeed.
Thy love, a genial law,
Its very aim doth draw
Within its holy range, and sweetly lure
Its longing toward the beautiful and pure."

Ethical Christianity, it will be noticed, stands in
striking contrast also with all other moral sys-
tems in that it furnishes an adequate dynamic for
its own realization.

In " Supernatural Religion," a book which was
intended to be a fatal assault on the Christian
faith, it was nevertheless confessed, " The teach-
ing of Jesus carried morality to the sublimest point
attained or attainable by humanity. The influ-
ence of his spiritual religion has been rendered
doubly great by the unparalleled purity and eleva-
tion of his own character." Mr. Lecky, though
an enemy of evangelical Christianity, has declared,
" It was reserved for Christianity to present to
the world an ideal character which through all
the changes of eighteen centuries has filled the
hearts of men with an impassioned love, and has
shown itself capable of acting in all ages, nations,
temperaments and conditions; has not only been
the highest pattern of virtue, but the highest in-
centive to its practice; and has exerted so deep an

72 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

influence that it may be truly said that the simple
record of three short years of active life has done
more to regenerate and to soften mankind than
all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the
exhortations of moralists." And Mr. J. Brierley,
an English author, whose interpretation of the
facts and truths of the Christian religion fre-
quently calls for a sharp dissent, nevertheless says
in " Religion and Experience: " " As against all
that had gone before, or was outside, we have
here [in Christianity] a religion that was, for
one thing, through and through ethical; that for
another, possessed apart from its precepts a unique
source of stimulus; and that for a third thing, set
its inspired ethic working not amongst the philos-
ophers, amongst the elite, but amongst the ob-
scurest and most neglected portions of humanity."
It should be added that the ethical principles
of Christ found fresh and consistent expression
in the teachings of his apostles. As the follow-
ers and servants of Christ men were exhorted to
do " the will of God from the heart." Whatso-
ever things were " true, honest, just, pure, lovely
and of good report," these things were to govern
thought and control action. Christ was exalted
as " the way, the truth and the life," and his
disciples everywhere were to be his " living epis-
tles." Somebody has said " the ethics of Paul

THE BIBLE 73

and John and Christ are quite as worthy of study
as the ethics of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche."
He might have truthfully added the names of
Aristotle and Plato, Kant and Hegel, Spencer and
Mill, and all other teachers ancient and modern.

The Epistles are plainly the unfolding of the
truth that was taught in germinal form in the Gos-
pels, and were a manifest fulfillment of the dis-
tinct promise of Christ to his disciples of the
Spirit of Truth, who should " lead them into all
the truth," emphatically the truth, the truth per-
taining to Himself and his kingdom, and the char-
acter and conduct of his followers; else Christ's
promise was null and void, and kindled an expec-
tation that was false.

5. The fifth method of studying the Bible is
the religious method, that is, the study of the
Bible as a Book of religion, a Book which con-
tains certain great truths which when coordinated
constitute a system of religious faith or a theology,
which Boccaccio defined as " the poetry of God."
The other methods which have been considered,
have been found increasingly important. This
method must be acknowledged to be by far the
most important of all, the supreme method. As
a Book of religion the Bible makes its strongest,
its most imperative appeal to men, and exerts its
largest educational influence. The truest moral-

74 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Ity is based upon a religious faith, and the man
who looks upon the Bible as an inspired Book of
religion will find every method of study productive
of the largest good.

Sabatier has said, " Man Is incurably religious,"
and President Shurman, of Cornell University,
characterizes man as " a religious animal," and
says that " without religion a man is only half a
man." The religious element is as real and as
integral in a man's nature as the intellectual, the
affectional and the volitional. Dean Hodges in a
chapter on " Religion and Moral Training " af-
firms, " Religion is not an artificial thing grafted
on human nature. It is an integral part of human
nature itself. It is native to the soul. Man is
just as essentially religious as he is social, political,
moral and aesthetic in nature. Anthropology and
psychology bear testimony to this fact." Educa-
tion to be worthy of the name, must include the
whole being. A recent writer has said, " We must
define the educated man in terms of life, and not
of some scholastic experience. And we must de-
fine him in terms of the whole of life. Washing-
ton and Lincoln were educated men, though they
had little experience of the school. The educated
man is a rounded character, well adjusted by na-
ture and by training to the world in which he is
called to live. He has learned self-mastery, con-

THE BIBLE 75

sideration for the rights of others and the final
art, that schools so often fail to teach, of know-
ing how to learn and keep on learning. Knowl-
edge that is applied to life and is increased in
using, sympathy that is ever awake and active as
a motive power for action, humility and curiosity
that deepen and broaden the soul in following
out the thoughts of God, — these are elements of
the education we desire for all men upon earth."
The professional athlete is not thereby an edu-
cated man. He has developed strength of mus-
cles and skill in their use, but they are only his
lower, his animal nature. He may have acquired
hardly the rudiments of an education. The man
who has amassed knowledge, the facts of history
and of science, and made himself familiar with the
problems of philosophy, is not necessarily a fully
educated man, no matter how many diplomas he
may carry. His knowledge must be converted
into wisdom, and his wisdom into character, into
reverence, into humility, into purity of thought
and desire, into unselfishness of purpose, into love
for the things of the spirit and a growing likeness
to that which is highest and best in personal being.
Religious faith is the ordained means of accom-
plishing this, when it becomes dominant in the
soul. There is a Godward side of man's nature,
the capacity of knowing and loving and serving

76 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

the Infinite Spirit, of having fellowship with the
personal Power above us which makes for right-
eousness. To neglect this is to remain half-edu-
cated, with the possibilities of the soul unrealized,
and the demands of the soul unmet, and the des-
tiny of the soul uncared for.

The Bible claims to be preeminently a religious
Book, a revelation from God, and its contents,
as well as its influence, justify its claim. It is
called " the joint product of God and man," " the
literature of an inspired race that saw God more
clearly than any other race." It has been said
that " when the Bible is at its highest it Is litera-
ture, and when literature Is at Its highest It Is reve-
lation." No education can claim to be complete
which does not recognize the Inestimable Impor-
tance of the Sacred Scriptures, and have a large
and definite place for their study, and no education
can be called Christian, which does not pay proper
respect to the Book which Is the depository and
vehicle of Christian truth. It Is not enough to
study only the history, or the biography, or even
the literature of the Bible. That is as far as some
college studies go. But that would be to omit
that which Is fundamental and vital. That would
be to pay attention to the prison walls, and Ignore
the life which dwells within. It is the moral and
religious teaching of the Book (the one Is In-

THE BIBLE 77

separable from the other) that gives to it its
supreme value and sacredness to every rational
mind.

There are three sources of religious truth, viz.,
the natural world, the inner life with its instincts
and its conscience, and the Word of God. The
last is a necessary supplement of the other two,
and when rightly interpreted, they confirm and
strengthen each other's testimony. No sublimer
utterance was ever penned than the Nineteenth
Psalm, which bursts forth in a tribute of praise
to the material universe. " The heavens declare
the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his
handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and
night unto night showeth knowledge. Their line
is gone out through all the earth, and their words
to the end of the world." It is no wonder that
such eloquent language has inspired the pens of
hymn-writers and poets, who have caught some-
thing of its spirit and voiced its faith in the divine
Creator and resident Deity of the marvelous
worlds which fill and swing in the boundless space,
as against a materialistic and Godless evolution,
which can create nothing, and against which the
heart and mind of men persistently rebel. No
more beautiful spiritual interpretation of the si-
lent, voiceless world has appeared than that from
the pen of Bishop H. W. Warren:

78 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

" The harp is ever singing to itself

In soft and soul-like sounds we cannot hear;
The stars of morning sing, and soundless words

Make God's commands run swift from sphere to sphere.
Each flower is always sending incense up,

As if in act of holy worshiping,
Till fragrant earth is one great altar, like

To heaven where saints their prayer-filled censers
swing.
The stars send out a thousand rays, writ full

Of mysteries we cannot read nor see.
Of histories so long and going forth.

So vast, the volumes fill infinity.
O Source Divine of things so fine and high,

Touch all thy children's souls with power to see
That vibrant earth and air and boundless sky

Still throb with immanent Divinity."

He that hath ears to hear, he will hear. He
that hath eyes to see, he will see. The testimony
is there, whether men recognize it or not, the tes-
timony to the infinite wisdom, power, wonderful
skill, aesthetic taste and love of beauty, and the in-
finite goodness of the personal Creator. Every
man who studies the objects and laws of the nat-
ural world, from the most sublime to the most
minute, may say, if he will, with the ancient sci-
entist, " I am thinking God's thoughts after Him."
Someone has said beautifully that the Himalayas
are only raised letters by which God teaches his
blind children to read the evidence of his eternal
power and Godhead. Blessed are the pure in

THE BIBLE 79

heart and the devout in spirit, for they shall sec
God here as well as hereafter, in the world of
nature as well as in the spiritual heavens. All
things visible may incite to worship, even though
what may be called the higher and more moral
attributes of God may not be clearly revealed in
them. It is nevertheless true as Dr. Holmes
sang, " I'hy glory Hames from sun and star," or
as Browning phrased it,

" You've seen the world,
The beauty, the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises, — and God made It all:
For what? . . . What's it all about?
To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? "

or as Mrs. Browning phrased It in lines still more
beautiful and positive,

" Earth's crammed with Heaven,
And every bush aflame with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes."

In the universal conscience, the inner light which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world,
there is the instinct or intuition of God, the knowl-
edge of right and wrong, the testimony to the
moral universe and the supreme Governor of all,
including every moral being, the hidden, almost
irrepressible and deathless longing after the In-

8o THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

finite Spirit. As another has said, " The listen-
ing ear of the race can never cease to hearken to
a Voice that speaks out of the silences beyond the
range of time and sense." It is the deepest fact
of human nature. " Thou hast made us for Thy-
self, and we find no rest until we find it in Thee."
The Christian Father who uttered those words,
voiced the cry of the human race. The apostle
Paul declares that God has not left Himself with-
out a witness in the inner spirit of all men,
" Which show the work of the law written in their
hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and
their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else
excusing one another." That conscience, that
inner light, that law written in the heart, that
longing after God, has often been silenced,
dimmed, perverted, maltreated, and made the
fruitful source of false religions, cruel faiths,
abominable superstitions, and immoral rites.
" Men became vain in their imaginations, and
their foolish heart was darkened. They changed
the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and
served the creature more than the Creator." As
the result, many of the abodes of men have been
shrouded in darkness, and have been filled with
all unrighteousness and uncleanness, and must
have the illumination of a new and stronger light,
the guiding and directing influence of a completer

THE BIBLE 8i

and authenticated Revelation, the regenerating
and transforming power of a divinely ordained
Instrumentality.

That new light, that authenticated Revelation,
that ordained Instrumentality is the Book we call
the Word of God. This is the third and neces-
sary source of religious truth, completing and en-
ergizing the other sources, and constituting the su-
preme religious educational asset for mankind.
This Book, and this Book alone, contains the wis-
dom that is able to " make men wise unto salva-
tion and eternal life."

Napoleon Bonaparte is reported to have said,
" Paganism is the work of man. One can here
read imbecilit)'. What do these gods, so boast-
ful, know more than other mortals? . . . They
have made a perfect chaos of morals. There is
not one among them all who has said anything
new in reference to our future destiny, to the soul,
to the essence of God, to the creation." Said
that skeptical philosopher and moralist, Rousseau,
'* I will confess to you that the majesty of the
Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the
purity of the Gospel has its influence on my heart.
Peruse the works of our philosophers, with all
their pomp of diction, how mean, how contempti-
ble, are they, compared with the Scripture. Is it
possible that a Book, at once so simple and sub-

82 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

lime, should be merely the work of man? Is it
possible that the sacred Personage whose history
it contains should be Himself a mere man? " The
language of Sir Walter Scott is so familiar as
hardly to need repetition.

" Within that awful volume lies
The mystery of mysteries.
Happiest they of human race,
To whom our God has granted grace
To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
To lift the latch and force the way;
And better had they ne'er been born.
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn."

Such language in endorsement of the Bible as
a Book of religion, coming from the lips not of
professional preachers and teachers, but from the
lips of representative men of other classes wide
apart, the great General, the infidel Philosopher
and the distinguished Novelist, may well dispose
our minds to inquire studiously as to the teachings
of this incomparable, cosmopolitan Book. It
may be said to contain a fourfold revelation.

I. The Bible contains a revelation of the being
and character of God, more complete, more
consistent, more worthy of adoration than can be
found anywhere else. Whatever other fruits the
study of comparative religion, now much in vogue,
may yield, the Bible's conception of God tran-
scends by an infinite distance all other concep-

THE BIBLE 83

tions. Its opening sentence, " In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth," surpasses
in the sublimity of its utterance, in its authoritative
tone, in its assumption of positive knowledge, and
in the sweep of its influence, every other sentence
that was ever penned. A recent writer has said,
" When this first sentence of the Bible was writ-
ten it was in ages when men held strange fancies
and fables concerning the origin of the world.
This sentence was in opposition to the notion that
the world sprang into being through chance or by
blind forces acting within and without it, and em-
phasized the fact that it was the product of the
wisdom and will of a personal Being. Some an-
cient conceptions were atheistic, some pantheistic,
and some polytheistic; but this single, simple sen-
tence sets forth the personality, eternity, omnisci-
ence, omnipotence, and spirituality of God. It ex-
cludes every possible ism of error in the human
conception of God." This is the Bible's interpre-
tation of all origins, its reaffirmation of the teach-
ing of natural theology as to the wisdom and cre-
ative power of the eternal Spirit.

But the Bible does not stop there. It completes
the perfect picture of the absolutely perfect Being,
as infinite in holiness and love as in wisdom and
power, the Possessor of every divine attribute, the
Personification of every moral excellence, and

84 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

even going so far as to interpret Deity in the
terms of loving and thoughtful Fatherhood, and
declaring " there is none beside Him," " none be-
fore Him," and " none like unto Him." He is
represented as " merciful," " gracious," " long
suffering," " compassionate," " forgiving iniquity,
transgression and sin," the divine " Shepherd,"
satisfying, leading, feeding and protecting his
flock, the Father of the prodigal son, waiting to
welcome the returning penitent with kiss and robe
and joyful feast. And then in order to make the
portrait more real, more comprehensible, more
resistlessly attractive and commanding. Revela-
tion gives to the world the story of the incarna-
tion, a new and unique life, human and divine,
beautifully natural and convincingly supernatural,
Son of man and Son of God, " God manifest in
the flesh," the living illustration of all that is high-
est in manhood and all that is essential in God-
hood, so that Christ could say, " He that hath
seen me hath seen the Father." Was ever pic-
ture so true, so real, so inspiring, so captivating
to the human heart? Even the infidel, Rousseau,
was lost in admiration as he contemplated it, and
his Infidelity seemed almost to be swept away by
the swelling tide of his appreciation, as the doubt
of Thomas was removed by the ocular evidence of
his Lord's reality and divinity. He says, " What

THE BIBLE 85

sweetness, what purity in his manner! What an
affecting graccfuhiess in his delivery! What sub-
limity in his maxims! What profound wisdom
in his discourses! What presence of mind, what
subtlety, what truth in his replies! How great
the command over his passions! Where is the
man, where the philosopher, who could so live,
and so die, without weakness, without ostenta-
tion? . . . Yes, if the life and death of Socrates,
which nobody presumes to doubt, were those of a
sage, the life and death of Jesus were those of a
God."

2. The Bible contains also a revelation of man,
his character and condition as a moral being, and
his relation to the God who made him. The
highest counsel of the old Greek philosopher to
his fellow man was, " Know thyself," This was
the supreme business of life, the Imperative duty
of every man. It was as if he had said, " The
unexamined life is not one fit to be led by man."
iVIodern reflection echoes the importance of the
ancient mandate. In Charron we read, "La
vrayc science ct le vray etude de rhomme c'est
rhomme." Alexander Pope endeavors to make
the command doubly emphatic by concentrating
man's thought on himself, and shutting out all
thought of Him who gave him power to think.

86 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

" Know then thyself, presume not God to scan ;
The proper study of mankind is man."

The testimony of Lotze is accepted by all per-
sons who are familiar with the literature and
characters of the Bible: " For the most faithful
delineation of the ever-recurring fundamental
characteristics of human life, the Hebrew his-
tories and hymns are imperishable models." It
needs to be remarked that no man can know
himself in his entirety and in his relations until he
knows something of the Being who brought him
into life, and whose image he bears. It was a flip-
pant remark of Henry Sidgwick, if he ever made
it, that " as he grew older his interest in what or
who made the world was altered into interest in
what kind of a world this is anyway." Man and
the world are both profound secrets, and will re-
main such, until they are studied in the light of
their origin, a guiding and overruling providence
and purpose, and their final destiny. The Bible
contains in some true sense every man's biography,
written by an unprejudiced and unerring hand,
and no man can know himself until he knows what
the Bible says about him. His self-knowledge
may deceive him, and his human biographer may
flatter or defame him, but the Bible reveals his
true image.

The Bible discloses man's primal glory. It

THE BIBLE 87

tells him what he can learn nowhere else, that he
was created in the image and likeness of God.
Whatever resemblance he may bear to the animal
world about him, whatever true science or science
falsely so-called may think as to his classification
with forms of animal life, God set him apart and
above them all, and gave him dominion over them
all, God breathed into him his own spirit and en-
dowed him with his own intellectual and moral
faculties, and man became a living soul and a son
of God. This gives to him a dignity and a glory,
of which science and philosophy know nothing.
It is not they who have discovered him, but it is
he who has discovered and given birth to them,
and they become his servants, the embodiments
and vehicles of his thoughts, and the means of his
growth and development.

President Henry Churchill King wisely sug-
gests; " If a man's greatest discovery, next to
the discovery of God, is the discovery of himself,
and if the complete discovery of himself in all his
spiritual possibilities involves the discovery of
God, we may perhaps get a new light on the sig-
nificance of the Bible for our spiritual life, if we
think of it as an aid to self-discovery."

By means of man's moral nature and his cre-
ated freedom it became possible for man to dis-
obey God, to forfeit his fellowship and glory, to

88 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

mar his likeness and sonship, and to lose his peace
of soul. The Bible conceals nothing. " Sin en-
tered into the world," we are told, " and death
by sin." This revelation of Scripture is con-
firmed by the universal consciousness of man.
" All we like sheep have gone astray." It is not
a new truth which the Bible discloses, but the in-
sistent iteration and enforcement of a truth as old
and as wide as humanity. To ignore it does not
change the fact. Men may differ as to the degree
of demerit and possible consequences, but sin is
here, an intruder in God's fair world, ever writing
its dark record in unmistakable characters upon
individual consciousness, upon domestic life, upon
social conditions, upon every page of the book of
human experience. The Bible holds the mirror
up to life, and reveals not only man's primal
glory, but his present shame and weakness, peril
and necessity. It presents no imaginary or over-
drawn portrait. Every thoughtful man acknowl-
edges its sad reality as true to the life of man.
The following obvious statement of fact is bor-
rowed from Dr. S. Parks Cadman. " Religion,
as well as science, has lived and will live by the
certainty of its ideas, and these ideas are not
' such stuff as dreams are made of,' but sterling
convictions, which have shaped and transfigured
the whole fabric of Western civilization."

THE BIBLE 89

3. The Bible contains the revelation of a possi-
ble restoration of man to union and fellowship
with God. It proclaims the offer, which would
be unspeakably wonderful, if it was not so famil-
iar, of forgiveness and peace through the divine
Christ. The voices of nature, though many and
varied, have in them no redemptive note. The
conscience and moral judgment contain no atoning
cross of reconciliation and pardon, but only words
of condemnation. To sit alone in court with an
enlightened conscience on the bench is to be with-
out hope. Conscience bears no olive branch, but
only a naked sword. Christ as a perfect example
only, resplendent in all the symmetry of a divine
manhood, would leave man far behind, a conspic-
uous failure, in the struggle for perfection of
character and life. The Bible furnishes the one
means of forgiveness and the one adequate in-
spiration for a godly and acceptable life, viz., the
cross of Calvary. " In whom we have redemp-
tion through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, ac-
cording to the riches of his grace." It reveals a
two-fold indwelling, " God in Christ, reconciling
the world unto Himself," and " Christ in man the
hope of glory." So we find in the Gospel of
Christ revealed not only the primal glory of man,
but his final glory, not only his primitive dignity
in God's likeness, but his ultimate restoration in

90 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

the likeness of Jesus Christ through union with
Him. " We shall be like Him," says the Apos-
tle, " for we shall see Him as He is." Faith in
Christ, submission to Christ, union with Christ,
this is the culminating truth of a progressive reve-
lation, this is the central fact in God's plan of sal-
vation, this is the method and secret of a restored
manhood. Unless a man has learned this (and
he learns it nowhere outside of the Bible), there
is a serious and fatal lack in his education. Not
only the highest ideal in life, but the highest in-
centive to nobility of character and the divinely ap-
pointed means for its attainment, are all painfully
wanting. Well has Tennyson, the great inter-
preter of God and man, expressed the truth when
he sang,

" Thou seemest human and divine,
The highest, holiest manhood Thou;
Our wills are ours, we know not how,

Our wills are ours to make them thine."

4. And lastly the Bible contains a clear and
convincing revelation of immortality, by which is
meant not simply continued existence beyond the
grave, but the unending continuance of a blessed
existence. The old question is still asking itself,
as it has been from the beginning, " If a man die,
shall he live again? " Science is very busy to-day,
endeavoring to discover proof that death does

THE BIBLE 91

not end all, that the spirit survives the cessation of
the bodily functions, and goes on to an endless ex-
istence. Matter it is claimed is indestructible. It
is a reasonable inference that personality survives
all change. Nature furnishes many suggestive
analogies of a resurrection-life. The Ingersoll
Lectureship has been established at Harvard Uni-
versity to discover and establish a scientific basis
for the immortality of the soul. The doctrine of
a future life has had a place in some form in all
ethnic religions, in shadowy beliefs, in religious
rites, in preserved mummies, and even in the faiths
of the most savage tribes and peoples. The In-
dian has his happy hunting ground. The uni-
versal longing has found expression in gross forms
of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls.
The hope has been argued from the incomplete-
ness of this life, which is distressingly full of un-
fulfilled promises, of unrealized plans, of blighted
hopes, of buds that have been broken off before
the time of flower and fruit. The doctrine has
even been grounded in the justice of the holy and
infinite Creator. Tennyson reasoned after this
manner,

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust;

Thou madest man, he knows not why;

He thinks he was not made to die;
And Thou hast made him; Thou art just."

92 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Jouffroy, a French writer, has said, " Ever}' man
feels within himself a crowd of desires and facul-
ties which this life does not content; and he would
deem himself very unhappy, and Him who has
made him very unjust, if his destiny were never
to attain this happiness, this perfection, of which
he has the idea. ... It is that which unavoidably
suggests to him thoughts of the other life; and
these thoughts once awakened in his mind, there
is no more rest for him, if the doubt remains, and
if no clear solution comes to solve it." Professor
John Fiske, in *' The Destiny of Man," says, " For
my part, I believe in the immortality of the soul,
not in the sense in which I accept the demonstra-
ble truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith
in the reasonableness of God's work," Poets,
philosophers, religionists, scientists, have all been
lending a hand in the advocacy of this great and
greatly desiderated doctrine of a future life.

How refreshing, how heartening, how comfort-
ing, how satisfying, it is to turn away from all
these conjectures, and inferences, and blind rea-
sonings, which can never bring rest and peace, and
listen to the clear, strong, positive, authoritative
affirmations of the Bible, and know that here we
have testimony which no doubt can shake and no
denial can destroy. In the Old Testament there
were bright and morning stars whose light was

THE BIBLE 93

suflicient to comfort and sustain the souls of the
patriarchs and the people in anticipation of life's
hastening end. The prophet Daniel declared with
unshaken confidence, " And many of them that
sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to
everlasting life, and some to shame and everlast-
ing contempt. And they that be wise shall shine
as the brightness of the firmament, and they that
turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever
and ever." In these words there is, in the words
of an able commentator, " obvious reference to
the final resurrection of all men, the just and the
unjust, the eternal joy of the first and the unend-
ing woe of the second, and the glorious reward of
those who had been successful workers for right-
eousness." In Job, perhaps the oldest of all the
Biblical books, we read the confident assurance,
" For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that
He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth : and
though after my skin worms destroy this body,
yet in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see
for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not
another." The meaning is most apparent. The
afflicted servant of God " now turns for comfort,
under the harsh treatment of men, to his assured
belief in a consolatory truth of universal and
permanent importance, which he desires to have
not only inscribed in a book, but also more last-

94 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

ingly and publicly recorded by being engraven on
a rock. ... It is therefore to his hope of vindi-
cation in a future life that he here refers, encour-
aging himself in the conviction that after death
he should joyfully behold his ever-living Vindi-
cator." In the Psalms we read, " For thou wilt
not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt Thou suffer
thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt
show me the path of life; in thy presence is ful-
ness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures
for evermore." Although these striking words,
as interpreted by both Peter and Paul, refer pri-
marily to the resurrection of Christ, the thought
of the Psalmist is naturally expanded to include
himself and all true servants of God, who know
the path of life, which Inevitably leads to God's
presence and communion with Him, " and from
that springs, of necessity, the idea of immortality."
It would seem that the ancient Psalmist antici-
pated the thought of the writer to the Thessa-
lonians when he said, " For if we believe that
Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which
sleep in Jesus, will God bring with Him." Of
the quotation from the Psalm Perowne says, " In
the utterance of this confident persuasion and hope,
David was carried beyond himself. He spake as
a prophet, knowing that God had promised of
the fruit of his body to raise up Christ to sit on

THE BIBLE 95

his throne. The hope of his own immortality
was based upon, and bound up in, the life of Him
who was at once his Son and his Lord." Only
one other passage needs to be quoted of those
found in the Old Testament. " As for me I will
behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satis-
fied when I awake with thy likeness," words which
have brought inexpressible comfort to minds per-
plexed by questionings as to the future state.
Perowne declares these words are not to be un-
derstood as meaning, " When I wake up from
sleep," nor, " When I find deliverance from the
present night of sorrow and suffering. ... I can-
not doubt that the reference is to a resurrection."
The Psalmist seems to have anticipated again the
language of the New Testament, where we are
told, " We shall be like Him, for we shall see
Him as He is."

It may be added that the translation of Enoch
and the translation of Elijah were a part of the
sacred history of the Jewish people, as firmly be-
lieved as any recorded events in that history, and
must have added their strong and unique testi-
mony to the doctrine of a future life.

Rather brilliant " morning stars " we have
found these passages to be. We read them to-
day at every Christian burial. Yet they fade
away in the fuller light and glory of the teaching

96 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

of Him who spake as never man spake. It will
be sufficient to quote a few of the utterances of
Christ as to the doctrine of immortality, " I am
the resurrection and the life. He that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."
" Because I live, ye shall live also." '* Marvel
not at this; for the hour is coming, in which all
that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and
shall come forth, they that have done good unto
the resurrection of life; and they that have done
evil unto the resurrection of damnation." Who
can ever forget or distrust the most beautiful
and consolatory words that were ever spoken by
lips human or divine, that carried unspeakable
comfort and strength to the hearts of the sorrow-
ing disciples, who listened to them, and have been
carrying comfort and strength to the hearts of the
sorrowing and dying ever since, and can never lose
their power? " In my Father's house are many
mansions, if it were not so, I would have told
you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if
I go and prepare a place for you I will come again
and receive you unto myself, that where I am,
there ye may be also."

Christ believed in a future life. He foretold
his own resurrection, and accomplished it to es-
tablish faith in Himself and his message. The
disciples believed in it, and went everywhere

THE BIBLE 97

preaching Christ and the resurrection. There is
no more induhitable fact in all history, ancient or
modern. There is no more trustworthy truth in
the axioms of science or philosophy. A faith in
immortality rests upon the word, the veracity of
the Son of God. Christ *' brought life and im-
mortality to light in the Gospel." The New
Testament is filled with the mighty, transforming
power of the world to come. That which may
have seemed to some dimly revealed before, now
shines in the light of a thousand suns. What the
world was seeking and longing to know for a
certainty, is now a part of the certified knowledge
of mankind. The grave has been illuminated
and its darkness dispelled. It is no longer a
closed tomb, but an open doorway. Death, to
use the strong language of Scripture, has been
" abolished," and the certain knowledge of this
blessed fact is contained in the Bible.

Some persons profess with great inconsistency
to repudiate the Bible and its teachings, and yet
are indebted to it for their highest conceptions of
morality, and for all they know of God and a fu-
ture life.

The following words are from the pen of the
English Professor of Moral Philosophy already
quoted, J. Bradford Thomson, " A nature with
such requirements cannot be indifferent to the pro-

98 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

fessions and promises of the religion of Christ.
Is it likely that man, so constituted, will turn aside
from the revelations of Christianity, and adopt
in preference the teaching of the materialist and
atheist, according to whom man perishes like the
brutes and is no more; a foam-fleck upon the rush-
ing river of universal being? Or will he not
rather exclaim, God made the soul for immortality,
and appointed immortality for the soul? Here is
found the true and longed-for rest, here the strong
and sustaining hope." What Milton thought
should be true of every great book, is preeminently
characteristic of the books of the Bible, " the pre-
cious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and
treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

Here then we have the fourfold revelation of
the Bible, viz., God the Infinite Spirit, the su-
preme Object of worship and affection; man, his
true character, his origin and destiny; the possible
union through Christ between man and his Maker,
and a real spiritual fellowship with Him; and the
doctrine of a future life, established beyond a
question or the shadow of a doubt. Without the
light which the Bible sheds on these, the greatest
of all truths, the world would be still groping in
darkness. An education which does not include
these verities of knowledge would be deplorably
incomplete, and inadequate to meet the demands

THE BIBLE 99

of the moral soul. The mind which does not wel-
come and appropriate these vital, transcendent
truths, will hav^e empty spaces which no amount of
secular knowledge can fill, and a diminished life
which must occasion everlasting regret. This is
the standard of fullness of knowledge and com-
pleteness of life, as Christ affirmed, " To know
Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom
Thou hast sent; this is life eternal."

It is because of this supreme characteristic of
the Bible, viz., that it is the veritable Word of
God, an inspired and authoritative revelation of
his character and will, a complete and final mes-
sage of grace and salvation to all the generations
of mankind, commanded by Christ to be made
known in all the world to every creature, that Bible
Societies have been established and generously
supported in Christian lands. It is interesting
to know that in the last year in order to carry out
the divine commission and to meet in some meas-
ure the world-wide need, the English and Ameri-
can Bible Societies have published and distributed
in hundreds of languages between ten and twelve
million copies of the Sacred Scriptures in whole
or in parts. Such a work, continued from year
to year, will prove to be no small contribution to
the effort to dispel the darkness, the ignorance and
superstitions of men, and shed abroad the light of

100 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Him who is the Light of the world, and in whose
name every knee shall eventually bow.

The bearing of this paper is more than per-
sonal. It has to do not only with man as an in-
dividual, a moral and intellectual unit, and with
the necessary completeness of his education, but
it has to do with man as a social being, a member
of society and a citizen of the Republic. The ed-
ucation which a man needs, and must have for
himself, society and the nation need, and must
have for themselves. The use of the Bible,
therefore, is intimately connected with the good
morals of the community, with the purity of the
social life, with the stability and perpetuity of
good government, and with the progress of the
race. It was John Milton who wrote, " There
are no songs comparable to the songs of Zion, no
orations equal to those of the prophets, and no
politics like those which the Scriptures teach.

Better teaching
The solid rules of civil government
In their majestic, unaffected style,
Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.
In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt,
What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so,
What ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat;
These only, with our law, best form a king."

Reference is often made to the undisputed fact
that the Bible was largely responsible for the

THE BIBLE loi

English Reformation, and for the civil and re-
ligious liberty which England and America enjoy.
Indeed democracy itself is declared to be the fruit
of the influence of the Bible. Dr. Cleland B.
McAfee says, " The English Reformation received
less from Luther than from the secret reading
of the Scriptures over the whole country. What
we call the English spirit of free inquiry was fos-
tered and developed by Wycliffe and his Lollards
with the English Scriptures in their hands. Out
of it has grown, as out of no other one root, the
freedom of the English and American people."
The founders of this Republic brought with them
the spirit of reverence for things sacred and divine,
high moral standards, regard for law, and above
all, the accountability of the individual soul to
God; and all these they had learned from their
Book of religion. It was these that inspired them
and guided them in their great undertaking. Pro-
fessor Bliss Perry says, " One Rev^erence, at least,
was common to the Englishman of Virginia and
to the Englishman of Plymouth and Massachu-
setts Bay. They were joint heirs of the Refor-
mation, children of that waxing and puissant Eng-
land, which was a nation of one Book, the Bi-
ble, ... a Book rich beyond all others in human
experience; full of poetry, history, drama; the
test of conduct ; the manual of devotion ; and above

102 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

all and blinding all other considerations by the
very splendor of the thought, a Book believed to
be the veritable Word of the unseen God. For
these colonists in the wilderness, as for the Prot-
estant Europe which they had left irrevocably
behind them, the Bible was the plainest of all sym-
bols of idealism; it was the first of the " Rever-
ences." Again he says, " The United States is
properly called a Christian nation, not merely be-
cause the Supreme Court has so affirmed it, but
because ' a Christian nation ' expresses the his-
torical form which the religious idealism of the
country has made Its own. The Bible is still con-
sidered by the mass of the people a sacred Book;
oaths in courts of law, oaths of persons elected to
great office, are administered upon it." It should
be added, as indicating the Christian character of
the nation, that the Congress of the United States,
and the army and navy have their chaplains, ap-
pointed by the Government and salaried out of
the public treasury. Moreover, State and City
administrations are wont to be inaugurated and
public buildings to be dedicated by prayer to the
God of the Christian revelation. An attempt to
eliminate these religious officials and to abolish
these religious services would be met by a nation-
wide protest, and would not only proclaim this
nation as a Godless nation, but would reduce it to

THE BIBLE 103

a worse than heathen condition, for heathen na-
tions have their authorized religious ceremonies.
The Supreme Court of one of our States has re-
cently taken action " barring finally and perma-
nently, on constitutional grounds, the Bible from
public use in the public schools." A correspond-
ent to a religious journal commenting on this
action, justly says, " It sounds anomalous that in
a nation which owes its existence to the devotion
of its founders to the principles of the Bible as
such, its youth should be denied the benefit of
Bible-reading, not to say Bible-study, in their
school exercises. But such seems to be one of
the paradoxical results of the logical ( ?) applica-
tion of the principles of liberty of conscience and
separation of Church and State." The cor-
respondent adds, " The evil of this is that appar-
ently it puts a public ban or stigma upon the Bible,
under which the lovers of the Book, cannot permit
it to remain. The very appearance of discrim-
inating against the Bible must be removed."
That Supreme Court in order to be consistent in
its action should decree that all literature and text
books making any reference to the Bible, or in-
culcating lessons contained in the Bible, or show-
ing the fruits of the Bible in individual character
and in national history, our own national history
included, should be excluded from the public

I04 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

schools forever. Neither modern English litera-
ture, nor the marked progress in ethical ideals
and in philosophic thought during the last three
hundred years, nor modern history in any of its
phases, can be studied intelligently without a
knowledge of the Bible.

One great reason, probably the great reason,
why the founders of the Republic exalted the Bible
to such a conspicuous place, was because of the in-
dissoluble connection which they believed to exist
between morals and religion, between personal,
social and political morality and the great truths
of the Christian faith. In their judgment the
highest morality was based upon the teachings of
a divine Revelation, and must be sustained and
perpetuated by them; the Bible which had given
to them their essential freedom and democracy
was necessary to preserve them and keep them
pure. Washington said in words which should
ever be remembered by the American nation,
" The free cultivation of letters, the unbounded
extension of commerce, the progressive refinement
of manners, the growing liberality of sentiment,
and above all, the pure and benign light of Reve-
lation have had a meliorating influence on man-
kind, and increased the blessings of society. Of
all the dispositions and habits of men which lead
to political prosperity, religion and morality are

THE BIBLE 105

indispensable supports. In vain would that man
claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor
to subvert these pillars of human happiness, these
firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.
The mere politician, equally with the pious man,
ought to respect them. And let us with caution
indulge the supposition, that morality can be sus-
tained without religion. Whatever may be con-
ceded to the influence of refined education on
minds of a peculiar structure, reason and experi-
ence both forbid us to expect that national moral-
ity can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
These noble words uttered without fear of being
charged with narrowness or bigotry, disclose a
rational and farsighted statesmanship which will
ever make the name of Washington illustrious.

In like manner Judge Hornblower, Chief Jus-
tice of New Jersey, who was born the first year
after the Declaration of Independence and died
widely honored in the third year of the Civil War,
declared, " Let this precious volume have its
proper influence on the hearts of men, and our
liberties are safe, our country blessed, and the
world happy. There is not a tie that unites us
to our families, not a virtue that endears us to our
country, nor a hope that thrills our bosoms in the
prospect of future happiness, that has not its
foundation in this Bible. It is the charter of char-

io6 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

ters, the palladium of liberty, the standard of
righteousness."

It was the prevalence of such views as these that
led the fathers to establish schools of learning
and to encourage the organization of Christian
churches, that we might be an intelligent, moral,
upright and God-fearing people, whose prayer
should ever be, " Let the beauty of the Lord our
God be upon us, and establish Thou the work of
our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands
establish Thou it." They had no thought of an
education which did not include morality and re-
ligion. And although they firmly believed in the
great principle of religious liberty, the separation
of Church and State, they did not believe in the
misinterpretation and perversion of that principle
which would separate religion from the State.
The Bible was read in the schools, not as a sec-
tarian book, but as a book of morals and religion,
with its silent but powerful appeal to the reverence
of the pupils, their love of truth and honor, their
recognition of the being of God and the spiritual
nature of man, and a belief in the immortal life
and an invisible world, and prayer was offered
to the Lord and Maker of us all. It is to be
feared that we are drifting away from the wise
spirit and purpose of the fathers, that in our nar-
row and erroneous interpretation of religious lib-

THE BIBLE 107

erty and the meaning of the separation of Church
and State, we are robbing the State of the princi-
pal means of its healthy growth and prosperity,
and destroying that which has given to us our re-
ligious liberty, and is its only preservative.

Bishop Anderson of Chicago says, " Education
has been completely secularized as if man had
no soul, and the world had no God. Religion has
been as completely isolated as if character had no
place in a child's education. Our education is
losing its religious values. Our religion is losing
its educational values."

The State is bound to be the protector and pro-
moter of the morals of the people for its own
sake. It exempts Church property, as it does
school property, from taxation, because Christian
churches minister to the peace, the good order and
purity of the community. Without them and
their unceasing ministry, life, property and hap-
piness would all be imperiled. The State sets
apart the Sunday as a day of rest and an oppor-
tunity for worship, because it believes that such
an ordinance is for the health and good morals of
the people, and for the protection of their rights.
If a man from conscientious scruples insists upon
observing Saturday, there is no law against it; but
his duty is clear, that is, to have two days of rest,
one for his conscience's sake and a second for his

io8 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

neighbor's sake, that his rest may not be dis-
turbed or his rights invaded. In like manner the
State has a right not only to insist upon the educa-
tion of the young people, but to determine its
character, that it shall possess a distinctly moral
element, that it shall not be non-moral or God-
less or non-patriotic or unpatriotic. Sects may
add to it, but they ought not to be allowed to
change or diminish it. The State should be con-
trolled and determined by the thought of its own
high interests. It is a matter of imperative needs
and of self-preservation. All education should be
under the supervision of the State, not only public
education, but that of private institutions, sup-
ported by private funds, especially if the State ex-
empts their properties from taxation. The edu-
cation should be such as will strengthen moral
character as well as Inform the mind, and will
prepare for good citizenship. A college sup-
ported by a religious denomination may teach sec-
tarianism in addition, if it chooses to do so, unless
the tenets and practices of the denomination are
Immoral, as in the case of the Mormons. Then
the State has no option but to assume control of
Its educational system, and purge It of Its per-
nicious and dangerous elements. If a college
charter prohibits sectarianism In Its teaching but
still provides and Insists that It shall be a Chris-

THE BIBLE 109

tian college, and give a Christian education, then
its teachers are honorably bound to avoid sectarian
teaching, and are bound in equal honor to build
up Christian faith. Christian morality and posi-
tive Christian character. To hold their positions
with the approval of conscience and the approval
of their fellow men, their whole influence, by
teaching and example, must be constructive of the
fundamental positions of the Christian religion,
and not destructive. Infidelity and skepticism can
be as sectarian as faith, and the worst kind of
sectarianism is a sectarian infidelity, and that
should be prohibited in every educational institu-
tion of whatever grade in the land, lest the solid
foundations of government be destroyed. His-
tory is not without its solemn warnings.

It is sometimes said that every branch of knowl-
edge, language, history, science, philosophy, so-
ciology and even mathematics can be taught not
only in a Christian spirit and in a Christian man-
ner, but so as to leave a Christian impression upon
character and life, and minister to the strengthen-
ing and confirmation of Christian faith. Profes-
sor John Fiske declared in 1886, " As in the roar-
ing loom of time the endless web of events is
woven, each strand shall make more and more
clearly visible the living garment of God." Pro-
fessor Shaler, also of Harvard University, says

no THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

in " The Interpretation of Nature," a strongly
theistic book, " As the conception of these and
other laws and principles operating in nature be-
comes more complicated, naturalists are being
driven step by step to hypothecate the presence in
the universe of conditions which are best explained
by the supposition that the direction of affairs is
in the control of Something like our own intelli-
gence. ... In other words, it seems to me that
the naturalist is most likely to approach the posi-
tion of the philosophical theologian by paths which
at first seemed to lie far apart from his domain."
Sir Oliver Lodge closed his Presidential Address
before the meeting of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science, held in September,
1913, with these significant words, "We are
deaf and blind to the immanent grandeur around
us, unless we have insight enough to appreciate
the whole, and to recognize in the woven fabric
of existence, flowing steadily from the loom of
an infinite progress towards perfection the ever-
growing garment of a transcendent God." This
language is strikingly similar to that of John
Fiske. An editor of a religious journal, com-
menting on this Address, said, " The more recent
developments of science have been all in the direc-
tion of confirming the supremacy of the spiritual,
the truth of creational evolution, the existence of

THE BIBLE iii

God, and the immortality of the soul." It seems
evident as another has said that, " Science is thus
leading to something beyond science as alone sup-
plying the solution of the world's riddle." A
living Professor of Biology, in an article re-
cently published, goes farther and affirms, " Real
religion finds ,no better ally than real science, and
false religion no saner foe. The insight of sci-
ence must find a present God, an abiding and im-
manent God, living, not dead, the great 'I am ';
a working God, not one who did work once, but
quit it; not a dead idol, or a dead notion, but the
pulsing flame and force in all and through all and
above all, the one true God ' in whom all things
consists.' . , . Science tends more and more not
only to show, but to prove, that the Christian life
is the only entirely rational life; that all it de-
mands is a sane and vital consistency with the
ethical needs and hungers of our nature to make
complete one whole human being, in character and
conduct, as God meant it; that there is something
in us that responds nobly to every item of the
Christian programme; in other words, that Chris-
tianity is psychologically and scientifically rational.
. . . The outlook of science is not toward a new
religion, but an all-pervading Christian religion,
the paragon and perfection of sanity; neither

112 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

fanaticism nor unreason, but righteousness, peace
and joy in the Holy Ghost."

That Professor is evidently a convinced and a
pronounced believer in the reality, the universality
and the finality of the Christian religion, and be-
lieves that his scientific knowledge is confirmatory
of every item of the Christian faith. He has
found that " the fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom," and also the middle and the end.
Most teachers of science are in accord with him.
Would that all were like-minded, and had as full
an appreciation of the responsibilities of their high
and holy calling.

Many American colleges and universities have
established chairs of Biblical Literature and His-
tory, believing that the curriculum would be sadly
deficient without such instruction. In many of
them, possibly in all, the instruction needs to be
reconstructed and expanded to a larger value and
service, covering the varied uses to which the re-
markable Book offers itself, viz., historical, bi-
ographical, literary, ethical and religious. There
are few departments in a college course, in which
the Bible would not be at home. A recent Uni-
versity Alumni Monthly contained a prepared list
of books for the guidance of students, which every
student ought to know by personal intimate ac-
quaintance. The list comprised the names of

THE BIBLE 113

about sixty authors, ancient and modern, and in-
cluded more than two hundred books. There
were Homer and Plato, Cicero and Virgil, Plu-
tarch and Marcus Aurelius, Dante and Chaucer,
Bacon and Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan,
Goethe and Victor Hugo, and English and Amer-
ican historians, novelists and poets. But the Bible
was placed at the head of the list. Of course it
was, and would have been had the list been many
times longer.

But the great problem at the present time is
with the public school, how the Bible may be re-
stored to its former place and lend its marvelously
helpful influence and greatly needed aid to the edu-
cation of the rising generation.* Many of the
teachers, both men and women, are Christians,
openly connected with Christian churches, and
their high personal character, known attitude to-
ward the Christian religion, and their general ad-
ministration of their schools exert a positive in-
fluence for good upon the minds of the children

* Inquiries, sent to the Superintendents of Schools in the
different States elicited the following replies. In twelve States
the oldest in the Republic, the Bible is required to be read in
the schools daily, according to a long established custom. In
thirteen States it is not excluded, and the reports state that it
is read quite generally in the schools. In five States the reports
state simply that it is read in a part of the schools. In two
States the reading of the Bible is said to be encouraged, but
the results are not given. And in one State it is left to local
Boards, whose action is not reported. No reports from the
other States are given, probably because none were received.

114 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

and youth under their care. They are living il-
lustrations of the Christian spirit and its molding
power upon character. They teach obedience to
authority, loyalty to duty, love for truth and hon-
esty, and respect for the rights of others, and in
many ways they are not only imparting the ele-
ments of secular education, but are seeking faith-
fully to prepare their pupils for the important du-
ties of citizenship in a nation, in which the power
rests upon the intelligence and purity and high
moral principles of the people. Professors
Sneath and Hodges, joint authors of a small vol-
ume on " Moral Training in the School and
Home," acknowledge the silent and important in-
fluence of the religious teacher in the work of edu-
cation in these words — " The personality of the
teacher is the constant text-book of the school.
The religious teacher, conscious of God, devoted
to the highest ideals, looking toward the life un-
seen and immortal, will overcome all limitations
and temporary hindrances, and make the school a
religious influence. Morality will be infused with
religion as flowers are filled with fragrance."

It has been well said, " Morality must be lived
before it can be taught; it is first introduced into
school life by example. . . . Ethics makes no
distinction between master and pupil."

But great and beneficent as are the work and

THE BIBLE 115

influence of such teachers, the results are acknowl-
edged by educators themselves to be far from sat-
isfactory. Men of eminence in the educational
world, men of large experience and wide observa-
tion, are recognizing and confessing the weakness
and inadequacy of our present methods of educa-
tion, even for the purpose of good citizenship, of
high toned morality and honest dealing between
man and man. Dr. Charles W. Eliot, late Presi-
dent of Harvard University, in an address before
the Connecticut Teachers' Association a few years
since, acknowledged frankly and regretfully " the
failures and shortcomings of American education,"
saying it did not furnish a successful method of
dealing with certain personal vices and social evils,
whose persistence was sadly disappointing to the
friends and advocates of popular education. Ed-
ucation, it is believed, must have introduced into
it somehow a stronger and more potent moral ele-
ment. It must somehow be made to touch the
deeper things of the spirit and kindle the nobler
emotions of the heart, inciting to reverence, purity,
self-restraint, self-sacrifice and worthy ambitions.
This conception of education is by no means
new or modern. It is as old as Greek philosophy,
if it is rightly interpreted. Professor Irving Bab-
bitt of Harvard University says, " We are told
that the aim of Socrates in his teaching of the

ii6 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

young was not to make them efficient, but to In-
spire in them reverence and restraint; for to make
them efficient, said Socrates, without reverence
and restraint, was simply to equip them with
ampler means for harm." " Not to make them
efficient," said Socrates (we are hearing much in
these practical days about the great need of effi-
ciency), "but to inspire in them reverence and
restraint," reverence for law, for truth and justice,
and the higher values of life, and the restraint of
the evil passions and appetites of the heart, and
of selfish and unworthy ambitions. Heeren, the
Greek historian, tells us significantly that " Greece
fell when things sacred ceased to be sacred." All
its art and education, philosophy and culture, did
not save It from decay.

The following paragraph is quoted from an
English author, " But the realization that re-
ligion is fundamental both to national greatness
and to the moral progress of human nature should
be a permanent conviction of the mind, the deep-
est and the most earnest — a conviction entirely
independent of chance occurrence for its emphasis.
From the beginning of time there have been no
morals without religion; and every period of the
world's history of a great moral decadence, and
the downfall of mighty empires, has been pre-
ceded by the triumphs of skepticism."

THE BIBLE 117

Emile Boutroux, a teacher of teachers at the
Fontenay School, says, " Even in the eighteenth
century Rousseau inquired whether intellectual
progress has moral progress for its necessary
consequence; he maintained that for civilization
to have the happy effect of transforming a human
being acting by instinct into a reasonable and free
individual, it must be dominated by the idea of
the moral determinations of human nature."

The National Educational Association, in its
Declaration of Principles in 1905, affirmed " The
ultimate object of popular education is to teach
the children how to live righteously, healthily and
happily, and that to accomplish this object it is
essential that every school inculcate the love of
truth, justice, purity and beauty. . . . The build-
ing of character is the real aim of the schools and
the ultimate reason for the expenditure of mil-
lions for their maintenance."

The Christian Register, a Unitarian organ,
wisely says, — " The more we open the world to
what we call civilization, and the more education
we give it of the kind we call scientific, the greater
are the dangers to modern society, unless in some
way we contrive to make the world better."

And Professors Sneath and Hodges declare —
*' Boys and girls may go out from such a school
. . . ignorant of the value of the virtues, and

ii8 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

resenting authority. They may be sent out into
the community equipped to do evil intelligently,
and inclined to do it. The very excellence of
the intellectual instruction may make the school
a menace to the State."

Can this " ultimate object " of popular educa-
tion be accomplished without the aid of moral
teaching enforced by a religious motive and re-
ligious truth? Herbart expresses the wide-
spread conviction when he says that the impera-
tive need in education is " character-training based
on an irrefragable foundation of morality."
Should the faithful teachers be deprived of the
slightest use of an instrumentality which is the
most hopeful, if not the only possible one, for
the accomplishment of the ultimate object of edu-
cation, which is the main justification of the
State's enormous expenditure? Has the Stalte
the right to recognize the Bible and.its influence
in any way as a necessary part of an educational
outfit? Or must it leave to the uncertainty or the
utter neglect of the home, or the limited oppor-
tunity of the Sunday School, whose influence only
a part of the children enjoy, a work on which it
depends for its peace and its abiding prosperity?
Here is the problem. The Jews and the Roman
Catholics (strange to say) object to the simple
reading of the Bible in the public schools, though

THE BIBLE 119

by no means all of them. Some Protestants ob-
ject, basing their opposition upon their conception
of the great doctrine of the separation of Church
and State, which they interpret as meaning the
separation of religion and the State. Yet there
is an increasing demand, growing out of a felt
necessity, for a recognition of the Bible in our
public school system. Its literary influence is
needed by all, especially by those who are not to
enjoy the opportunities which a college course
may offer. Its charm can be felt by the young-
est minds, and its elevation of the literary taste.
It has been called " the key to modern culture,"
and opens the door to the better enjoyment of the
true riches of our libraries. But above all, its
moral and religious influence is needed by the
mind in its most plastic period, when impressions
sink deepest and abide longest; and the impres-
sions made by the pure Word of God will be
good and only good, and helpful to the family life
and to parental authority and discipline, whatever
may be the particular religious faith of the par-
ents, as well as a determining influence upon the
character of the children.

To quote again from the authors above men-
tioned— *' If the function of the school is to send
out, not merely persons who can read, write and
cipher, but good citizens, then it is plain that the

I20 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

highest service the school can render to the com-
munity is to secure the goodness of those citizens
by founding it on the soundest possible basis."
In order to accomplish this it is evident that moral
sanctions must be enforced by religious sanctions.
President Stanley Hall says, " The realization that
God's laws are not like those of parents and
teachers, evadible, suspensible, but changeless, and
their penalties sure as the laws of nature, is a
most important factor in moral training."

Mr. Huxley is compelled to confess, " I have
always been strongly in favor of secular educa-
tion, in the sense of education without theology;
but I must confess I have been no less seriously
perplexed to know by what practical measures the
religious feeling, which is the essential basis of
conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly
chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without
the use of the Bible. The Pagan moralists lack
life and color, and even the noble stoic, Marcus
Aurelius Antoninus, is too high and refined for
an ordinary child." This is the glory of the
Sacred Scripture, that while its thoughts often
tax the minds of the most learned and mature, its
language is suited to the simplest and the hum-
blest. " A child can play in its waters, and an
elephant can swim in them."

Different remedies are being urged by many who

THE BIBLE 121

are interested in the best education of the young
and in the welfare of the nation, for the serious
neglect to secure the full value of the Bible as
an educational influence upon the life of youth.
Of course the instruction in the Christian home
and the Sunday School needs to be advanced to
the highest point of perfection, but even then a
large portion of the scholars are not included un-
der such influences, and the responsibility of the
State is not met. It has been suggested that the
schools close one hour earlier each day or that
a half day each week be given up, and that the
scholars of such parents as are willing be per-
mitted to receiv^e instruction from especially ap-
pointed teachers in the Bible, and in the applica-
tion of its teachings to conduct and life. It has
also been suggested that the different religious
denominations withdraw their children from the
general public schools, and organize them into
sectarian schools which shall be under the imme-
diate supervision of the Church authorities, and
in which the tenets and practices of the individual
Church may be freely taught. This is already be-
ing done by the Roman Catholic Church, and the
children in large numbers are being gathered in
parochial schools, and taught by priestly teachers
in courses of instruction, over which the State has
no control, and of which it knows absolutely noth-

122 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

ing. The reports of parents who have with-
drawn their children from these schools because
of dissatisfaction with the education they were re-
ceiving, state that the education is superficial and
inadequate, and is calculated to make the pupils
Roman Catholics first rather than intelligent citi-
zens of a free Republic, in which the conscience
is free, and every man is responsible only to God
and the revelation of his will, which He has made
in his inspired Word. Moreover, the Roman
Catholic authorities are making bold and per-
sistent demands for a share in the public funds
for the maintenance of their schools, and already
confidently boast of speedy success by reason of a
rapidly increasing immigrant vote, which will be
able to dictate party-politics, and control legisla-
tion. There should be but one reply to this de-
mand, viz., that school funds can never be used
for sectarian purposes, that consent in one case
would establish a most confusing and dangerous
precedent, and would be a direct and flagrant vio-
lation of the fundamental principle enunciated in
the national constitution.

The course to be pursued to remedy the serious
deficiency in our educational system, which seems
to be feasible and unobjectionable to an increas-
ing number of thoughtful citizens, is to restore the
Bible, in whole or perhaps better in part, to a

THE BIBLE 123

recognized and influential place in public instruc-
tion as an unequaled literary standard, as a book
of superior ethical value, and as inculcating a re-
ligious motive without which morality has a weak
and uncertain basis. The Bible cannot be
charged with being a sectarian book, and there
can be religion, that is, the acceptance of great,
universal and unchangeable truths about God, in
harmony with the deepest instincts of the moral
nature of man, without sectarianism. A prom-
inent educator, the Principal of a Baptist Acad-
emy, has recently declared in a public address,
" The Bible should be taught in our public schools
because of its value as history and its value as
literature. School and college training in the
humanities covers the history and literature of all
peoples, except that peculiar people whose reli-
gious spirit has permeated all art, literature, law
and government, and is the lasting glory of our
modern civilization. More than all, the Bible
should be taught in our public schools for its
moral and religious influence. Since a nation is
the aggregation of its individual units, the people
must be moral and religious as well as intelligent.
It is the province of the State to teach morals and
religion as the foundation of its own prosperity.
States are moral persons, and as such need a
moral and religious training. No other civilized

124 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

nation except the United States neglects moral and
religious instruction in its educational system.
The Bible should be taught because this is a
Christian nation, and the public schools should
conform to the national character. Such teach-
ing does not produce a union of Church and
State, for the Bible is a Book common to both.
If the State hands over to the Church instruction
in some truths essential to national well-being, it
thereby vacates a part of its own authority, and
really does form a union with the Church. The
Government should administer its own affairs in
training youth to a full understanding of the teach-
ing of the Bible upon which the nation is founded.
The Bible is not a sectarian Book but rather a
foe of all sectarianism."

This is eminently wise and sane reasoning.
Many persons who cherished a narrow concep-
tion of the meaning of the separation of Church
and State, have been compelled by further reflec-
tion to accept a broader view, as more in harmony
with the principles on which our nation was
founded, and necessary to the continued growth
and permanent prosperity of the Republic. This
broader interpretation is a return to the wisdom
of the founders. If additional evidence is
needed, it can be abundantly produced. Hon.
Thomas S. Grimke, a distinguished Scholar and

THE BIBLE 125

Philanthropist in the South, declared, " Believing
as I do that one of the first duties of the Refor-
mation was to have incorporated the Bible into
the whole course of instruction, I trust the time
is not far distant when this principle will be uni-
versally acknowledged and acted on, that the
Bible is the only good basis, and the only safe, en-
during cement, of education." Rev. J. H. Seelye,
D.D., a well known Biblical scholar, has affirmed
that " The religion of this country is that of the
Bible ... It is that which gives character and
force and stability to our government and laws.
You might as well take out the heart from the
body, and suppose that it would be a living body
still, as to take away the Bible and all its in-
fluences from our institutions, and expect that
these will be preserved from decay. He that
does not see, and will not acknowledge the power
of the Bible in building up the whole framework
of American institutions, is either unwise or in-
sincere." Benjamin Rush, M.D., the honored
physician and signer of the Declaration of In-
dependence, said, " In contemplating the politi-
cal institutions of the United States, I lament that
we waste so much time and money In punishing
crimes, and take so little pains to pi-event them.
We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect
the only means of establishing and perpetuating

126 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

our republican form of government; that is, the
universal education of our youth in the principles
of Christianity by means of the Bible; for this
divine Book, above all others, favors that equal-
ity among mankind, that respect for just laws,
and all those sober and frugal virtues which con-
stitute the soul of republicanism."

In harmony with the views of this Christian
physician and statesman is the frankly expressed
opinion of the agnostic philosopher. Professor
Huxley — " I may add yet another claim of the
Bible to the respect and attention of a democratic
age. . . . Nowhere is the fundamental truth,
that the welfare of the state, in the long run, de-
pends upon the righteousness of the citizens, so
strongly laid down. The Bible is the most dem-
ocratic book in the world."

All persons may not be agreed as to the ex-
tent to which this education should be carried,
but it would seem that no man interested in the
moral character of the young, who to-morrow are
to be heads of families and to hold the reins of
government, and no lover of the country's wel-
fare and prosperity, could raise any objection to
the introduction and use in the public schools of
such selections from the Scriptures as are appro-
priate to their special needs, for the cultivation of
literary style and high thinking, and of those pri-

THE BIBLE 127

vate and social virtues which make for noble char-
acter and responsible citizenship. A collection of
parts of the Bible, for example, like the Ten Com-
mandments, the stories of Joseph and of Queen
Esther, the beautiful idyl of Ruth, the drama of
Job, which Alexander Pope said " exceeds beyond
all comparison the most noble parts of Homer,"
the nineteenth and twenty-third Psalms and many
others, the sparkling and timeless wisdom of
Proverbs, several chapters in Isaiah, of which
Coleridge said " after reading them. Homer and
Virgil are disgustingly tame, and Milton himself
barely tolerable," the messages of the old Proph-
ets which thunder with demands for private
and social righteousness, the beatitudes of Mat-
thew and the whole Sermon on the Mount, the
kingly Life recorded in Mark, the touching par-
ables of Luke, so natural and yet so divine, the
fourteenth to the seventeenth chapters of John,
which take us up into the third heavens of truth,
the wonderful story of Paul's life and heroic con-
secration to the present and eternal welfare of
men, to whom he confessed himself a debtor for
the simple reason that he was a possessor of
riches which they had not, the striking appeal to
integrity and holiness of life in the sixth chapter
of Romans and the intensely practical lessons for
the control of conduct which close the book, the

128 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

unparalleled and immortal panegyric of love, the
crowning, the supreme grace, in the thirteenth
chapter of First Corinthians, — But why specify
more? What a collection of literary gems, of
moral treatises, of exalted truths expressed in the
most attractive forms for the instruction, the puri-
fication, the inspiration of the mind and heart of
youth ! It is no wonder that Professor Gaussen
of Geneva should call the Bible, " God's great an-
them of revelation, in which we have the sublime
simplicity of John, the argumentative, elliptical,
soul-stirring energy of Paul, the fervor and
solemnity of Peter, the poetic grandeur of Isaiah,
the lyric moods of David, the ingenuous and ma-
jestic narratives of Moses, the sententious and
royal wisdom of Solomon."

The great body of the Bible is composed of
moral and religious teachings utterly unrelated to
the controversies which have divided Jew and
Christian or Christian denominations from each
other.

It would seem as if little or no objection could
be raised from any source to such beautiful and
wholesome and character-building teachings in
our public schools. No reasonable man, no
friend of ethical instruction as having to do with
the development of character and life, no patri-
otic citizen anxious that the nation should pre-

THE BIBLE 129

serve the high Ideals of the fathers, could raise
any serious opposition to such use. No atheist
or infidel, if such there be among us, would lift
his voice against the plan proposed, unless he is
willing to be regarded as the enemy of virtue,
of the highest education of the young, and of the
weal of the Republic. Any opposition from that
quarter may be regarded as a negligible quantity.
There are few pronounced atheists or infidels
among us. Men almost without exception, what-
ever their belief or unbelief, desire Christian bur-
ial for their friends and for themselves. It is
manifestly absurd to compel a community, per-
meated by a religious faith, to eliminate all ref-
erence to God and religion from their educational
system, without which their education would be
fatally weak, for the sake of two or three pro-
fessed unbelievers. Such a procedure would be
the worst kind of tyranny, and would change re-
ligious liberty into a mockery. An incoming
atheist would thus have power to pervert and un-
dermine the educational structure and even
the civil government of a Christian commun-
ity, if it had in it any recognition of God.
No intelligent Roman Catholics could object to
such use, for such teaching forms a part of their
professed educational system, and would enforce,
and in no way conflict with, what Is best and holi-

I30 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

est in their claims, and could be supplemented by
what is essential to the perpetuation of their par-
ticular church organization. The members of the
Jewish faith could not reasonably oppose the plan,
for the selections would be in large part taken
from their most sacred books; and very many
leaders among them at the present time, while
they do not accept Jesus as their promised Mes-
siah, being disposed rather to believe that He was
carried away by the enthusiasm of his disciples
into that belief in reference to Himself and his
mission (Is it not rather the correct interpreta-
tion to say that He found it difficult to overcome
the unbelief of his doubting disciples?) , have come
to feel a national pride in Jesus as one of their
own race, and to proclaim Him as a great Jewish
prophet and teacher, because of his remarkable
and increasing influence upon the best thought
of modern times.*

Moreover, it is believed that Protestant Chris-
tians, under the new and saner interpretation of
the meaning of the separation of Church and
State, viz., that it does not mean the separation of
religion and the civil government, but only that

*The following tributes to Jesus are from eminent Jews, and
are samples of many that might be adduced.

Mr. Claude Montefiore: "The most important Jew that has
ever lived, to whom the sinner and the outcast, age after age,
have owed a great debt of gratitude."

Dr. Isidore Singer: "I regard Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew

THE BIBLE 131

the Church as an organized institution shall not
rival or interfere with or be allowed to control
the civil powers which themselves are ordained
by God, will not long be willing to exclude from
our educational equipment, now actually and
widely acknowledged to be inadequate, the chief
source of moral and literary culture, and the one
instrument above all others that can elevate the
education of the young to the highest standard of
efficiency, and preserve the civil institutions, in-
herited from the wise founders, from weakness
and decay, viz., the Bible. A general movement
on the part of the better class of our citizens

of the Jews, one whom all Jewish people are learning to love.
We are glad to claim Jesus as one of our own people."

Dr. Berkowitz: "In Jesus there is the very flowering of
Judaism, the noblest Rabbi of them all."

Jacob SchiflF: "We Jews honor and revere Jesus of Nazareth
as we do our own prophets."

Dr. Friedlander: "The Divine Son of Man," and, "It is the
glory of Judaism to have produced such a being."

Dr. Kohler: "The Jew of to-day beholds in Jesus an in-
spiring ideal of matchless beauty. . . . The very sign of the
cross has lent a new meaning, a holier pathos to suffering, sick-
ness and sin. . . . All this, modern Judaism gladly acknowl-
edges, reclaiming Jesus as one of its greatest sons."

Dr. Max Nordau: "Jesus is the soul of our soul, flesh of
our flesh. Who, then, could think of excluding Him from the
people of Israel? St. Peter will remain the only Jew who said
of the Son of David, I know not the man."

Rabbi Stephen Wise: " In reappropriating their elder brother,
Jesus, the Jews of to-day are not urging a single step towards
Christianity, but accepting the Jewish teaching of Christ, the
Jew, a teacher, a leader, a prophet, clear-visioned, tenderly
loving, unselfish, godlike though not uniquely godly, and not
humanly divine, but divinely human."

132 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

would easily result in a nation-wide recognition of
this most valuable educational asset known to
mankind.

President Woodrow Wilson, with a prophetic
insight into national conditions and needs, has re-
cently given expression to this conviction —
" There are problems which will need purity and
an integrity of purpose such as have never been
called for before in the history of this country.
I should be afraid to go forward if I did not be-
lieve that there lay at the foundation of all our
schooling and all our thought the incomparable
and unimpeachable Word of God."

I should be unjust to my deepest convictions, if
I did not in closing this paper reassert and em-
phasize my belief in the Bible as the inspired
Word of God, a divine Revelation indeed, worthy
of all acceptation, to continue to the end of time
to make known to mankind the gracious purpose
and will of God, to show to sinning men how they
can be reconciled to God through penitence and
faith in an atoning Saviour, how they can live
righteously, meet successfully life's high demands,
bear triumphantly the ills to which flesh is heir,
attain unto the stature of perfect manhood, and
die in the peaceful assurance of a blessed immor-
tality. It was S. T. Coleridge who said, " I
know the Bible is inspired, because it finds me at

THE BIBLE 133

greater depths of my being than any other book."
Experience is the test of truth. Millions in the
past, and millions more in the present have tested
the power of the religion of Christ to meet the
deepest needs of the human heart, and have not
found it to fail. A recent English writer has
said, " Such, then, is the fourfold deepest need
of the human heart; God's peace, to lead us into
a truer and more assured conception both of
righteousness and sin; God's peace and reconcil-
iation, to restore us to right relations to Himself
and to his will; God's love, to dower the heart
with plenary joy and hope, and a sense of over-
flowing fullness and sufficiency; and God's
strength passing into our weakness, to fortify us
in duty, to uphold us in conflict with evil, and to
assure us final victory in the battle of a good and
godly life. A religion that can adapt itself to all
these moral and spiritual needs of the heart, in
the sense of recognizing them, meeting them,
supplying them all to the full, and leaving noth-
ing wanting to constitute itself the light and the
peace and the joy and the strength and the hope
of all human existence in life and in death, such a
religion, it is plain, must as a practical religion be
absolutely perfect."

That religion is the Christian religion. The

134 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Christian religion is revealed in a Book. That
Book is the Bible.

" Father of mercies, in thy Word

What endless glory shines!
Forever be thy name adored

For these celestial lines.
Oh, may these heavenly pages be

My ever dear delight!
And still new beauties may I see,

And still increasing light! "

The vivid imagination of Edward Everett
Hale portrayed the pitiable condition of " a man
without a country." Only the pen of inspiration
can depict the infinitely more deplorable condi-
tion of a man or a country that should try to live
without the knowledge of God and his revealed
will.

CHAFFER III

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY

THE nineteenth century is universally re-
garded as a century of remarkable progress.
No one questions for an instant that in discovery,
in invention, in the arts of living, in the accumula-
tion of wealth, in all lines of material advance-
ment and prosperity, the last century surpasses
any century in the world's history of which we
have knowledge. All the forces of nature have
been harnessed to the car of human progress.
When we think of the limitations of the fathers
who lived a hundred years ago, the almost entire
absence of luxuries and even of conveniences
which we now regard as necessities, of the use of
steam, of gas, of electricity, the steamship, the
railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, the phrase
res angusta dom't, which was descriptive of gen-
eral conditions at that time, seems painfully im-
pressive. We wonder as we try to recall their
simple, circumscribed life, how the people of that
generation managed to live and take comfort in

135

136 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

life, and we thank God that " the lines have fallen
to us in pleasant places, and that we have a goodly
heritage." As someone has truly said, we do
not now exist, we live. Knowledge has certainly
" grown from more to more," especially the
knowledge of the natural sciences and their appli-
cation to the needs of modern life, and also of
other peoples and lands. Buried cities have been
exhumed and brought to light. There are no
longer hermit nations and dark continents.

The question may be asked, has the religion of
the people participated in the progress of the last
century? Has the church of Jesus Christ, using
the term as descriptive of the varied visible forms
of organized Christianity, in any degree lived up
to Its responsibilities? Has It shared in the gen-
eral activity that has been going on around It?
What has it to show that Is proof of the divine
life which it professes to possess, and that will
make a creditable chapter in its history? Of
course, no one can claim that the religion of the
people has been as active, as aggressive, and as
abundant In achievement as It might have been,
and ought to have been, that the Christian church
has made the progress which with God's help was
possible, and has molded the Ideals, and minis-
tered to the needs, and lifted the life of the people
as a conscientious fidelity to its divine commission

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 137

would have enabled it to do. All human works
are marked by imperfection. Whatever man's
hand touches is doomed to weakness. No man
and no church ever attains in this world unto its
ideal of life and service. " Our own hearts con-
demn us."

But this should not prevent us from recognizing
the achievements of the past, and thanking God
for whatever of success and prosperity has been
secured. Inhere is a tendency at the present time
to speak disparagingly of the past, to ignore what
the church has accomplished, to criticise sharply,
even censoriously, its spirit and methods, and even
its ideals and doctrinal standards, for the purpose,
it may be hoped, of arousing it to new zeal, in-
creasing its activity and usefulness, and giving to
it a broader vision of its Christ-given mission and
the means and methods by which it is to be ac-
complished. But a wise father is wont to com-
mend his son for what he has tried to do well, if
he desires to encourage him to do better. He
who has only words of severe and unrighteous
condemnation for past effort and its measure of
success, is little likely to stimulate to increased
effort and fidelity. Much of the sharp and un-
pardonable criticism which is being poured upon
the Christian church to-day grows out of a pro-
found ignorance of its spirit and efforts, its in-

138 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

fluence and progress, or of a bitter hostility to it
as a divine institution. Moreover, for a man to
blind his eyes to the luminous record of the
church's past achievements and its present moral
and spiritual power in the world, is to refuse to
honor God, who by his indwelling and outwork-
ing Spirit has made it a mighty leaven for the
regeneration of individual life and the purifica-
tion and improvement of social customs and con-
ditions. When all the facts are remembered, it
may be said without fear of successful contradic-
tion that the nineteenth century of the Christian
era has been unequaled in moral and spiritual
achievement, as well as in material progress, by
any century that has preceded it, that the church
of Christ in activity, in aggressiveness, in numer-
ical growth and in its moral standards, has come
nearer to fulfilling the divine purpose and the lofty
ideals of its Founder than at any period, at least
since the third century. Prof. Charles R. Erd-
man of the Princeton Theological Seminary
says, " The last century of Christian history has
been characterized by notable achievements in var-
ious spheres of religious thought and endeavor.
It has been an era of great activity in Biblical and
theological science, of marked development in
philanthropic and social service, of unequaled
progress in evangelical and missionary work. All

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 139

these activities have been manifestations of the
spiritual life of the church. In its essence this
life has been the same in all ages, however varied
may have been its providential expressions and em-
bodiments."

Take for instance its obedience to Christ's final
commission to " make disciples of all nations."
The last century has been preeminently the mis-
sionary century. At its beginning the church
which, as a whole, had been sleeping, awoke to a
new appreciation of Christ and spiritual religion,
and a new sense of responsibility for the nations
that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.
Thousands of men and women have heard the
call of God and have gone forth to labor and to
die that they might bear witness to Him who gave
his life for the life of the world, and billions of
dollars have been laid upon God's altar for their
sending and their support. As the result of this
heroic consecration and willing sacrifice, within
the hundred years all the great heathen nations
have been visited, Christianity has laid permanent
foundations in all lands, churches and schools
and hospitals have been established, the Word
of God has been translated into hundreds of
tongues, an efficient native ministry has been
raised up and educated, and already millions have
been converted and other millions have been'

I40 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

brought under the influence of the Gospel of
Christ.

It has been stated that " There have been three
times as many adherents added to Christianity
during the last century as during the first sixteen
centuries of its existence. Only thirty-six per
cent, of the world's population were governed by
Christians in 1786, now more than fifty-five per
cent. In 300 years Christian Powers have in-
creased the territory under their rule from seven
per cent, of the world's surface to eighty-two per
cent. In view of these figures we feel that not
only is Christian faith not on the decline, but that
it is growing with great rapidity, and that Dr.
Dorchester has truly expressed it when he said,
" No intelligent person standing in the light of the
last four centuries and beholding the great re-
ligious movements of this age, can doubt that
Christianity is advancing. Every year it is rob-
ing itself with new effulgence and pouring its
blessed illumination upon new millions of earth's
population."

The hoary religious systems of the far East
are being rapidly undermined by the Gospel of
Christ; their crude moralities are giving place to
the purer ethics of Christianity; and in one in-
stance, in the largest and most conspicuous na-
tion of all, the form of government has yielded

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 141

under practically Christian leadership to the en-
lightening influence of the advanced Christian
civilization of the West. An English correspond-
ent after a prolonged visit to China, declared,
" The missionaries are the men who began the
work of awakening China. . . . Their work Is
not to be measured by their enrolled converts.
. . . They have been not only the teachers of
religion, but the advance agents of civilization."
The leaven of the one true religion has been In-
troduced, and even though the aid of Christian
lands should now be withheld, the spiritual leaven
of revealed and transforming truth would un-
doubtedly go on working until the whole lump of
heathenism is leavened. Sir Monier Monier-
WlUiams affirmed thirty years ago that, " The
present condition of India seems very similar to
that of the Roman Empire before the coming of
Christ. A complete disintegration of ancient
faiths Is In progress in the upper strata of society.
Most of the ablest thinkers become pure Theists
or Unitarians. In almost every large town there
is a Samaj or society of such men, whose creed
would be well expressed by the first part of the
first article of the Church of England." And
Cheshub Chunder Sen has asserted that " Buddha
no longer rules in India but Jesus Christ."

A Professor in one of the Universities of Japan

142 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

recently declared, " No man can estimate the con-
tribution which Christianity has made to Japan.
. . . Japan has taken the best of everything found
in Western civilization, and she must take the best
in religion."

As showing the present missionary activity an
American journal recently published the follow-
ing facts — "At the close of the year 1911, the
total missionary funds raised by the various Pro-
testant missionary organizations here and abroad
for work in heathen lands were $25,297,074.00.
With this magnificent annual offering, support
was furnished for 22,058 white missionaries and
'88,542 native helpers, teachers, pastors, Bible
women and evangelists, at 49,579 different mis-
sionary stations in India, Africa, Japan, China,
Burma, Siam, the Arctic, South America and
Polynesia. The missions had an enrolled list of
4,875,454 adherents professing Christian belief,
of whom 2,304,308 were communicants. In the
same year there were 1,477,049 children in the
various missionary schools. The United States
contributed nearly one-half of the total fund for
conducting the whole work, having raised last year
$12,290,005.00 for missions."

The work which has been accomplished, great
as it is, is not so great a work by a vast deal as
would have been achieved, if every disciple of

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 143

Christ had been fully consecrated and every power
had been laid upon the altar of service for the
world's Redeemer; but it bears witness to the
commendable missionary spirit of the church which
has characterized the nineteenth century.

It should be added (what of course was inevi-
table) that the home missionary spirit in Christian
lands has moved on with equal and even greater
pace during this period, and has been rewarded
with splendid results. If we confine our obser-
vation to our own land, with which we are most
familiar, we find that every evangelical denomina-
tion has been stirred to increasing activity, and
has organized vigorous missionary societies, city,
state, and national, ministering indiscriminately
to the needy native and foreign populations, car-
ing for the aboriginal tribes which still remain,
the native born settlers who are pushing Westward
the course of empire, the destitute freedmen of the
south, and the swelling tides of immigrant
population that are flooding our cities and sweep-
ing into the Western prairies. The church was
never so responsive as it is to-day to the appeal
of the destitute rural sections of our country and
the more imperative challenge of the city. It seeks
to embrace in the ever widening scope of its ac-
tivity all conditions of people, all localities and all
nationalities, and God's blessing has been, and

144 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

still is, on it all. The Baptist denomination in
this country may serve as an illustration of growth
as well as of service. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century it numbered 75,000 or 80,000
members; at the end of the nineteenth century the
number of communicants had swollen to more
than five millions. The churches of Christ have
not been wholly indifferent to their solemn duty
and privilege, and surely God has given the in-
crease. Great spiritual awakenings in response
to prayer and earnest effort have been expe-
rienced at frequent intervals, and Pentecost has
been repeated again and again. While the
churches humble themselves before God in view
of the fact that they have not done more, may
they not also praise Him that He has enabled
them to do so much, and especially for the
strengthening purpose increasingly manifest to go
forward to the conquest of this land and of all
lands for our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?

The nineteenth century has been also the great
educational century in this country. In the year
1800 there were but few colleges and institu-
tions for higher education among us, and those
were poorly endowed. No college had yet been
founded for young women. At the present time
almost every State has a college of its own. Some
of them have several colleges representing dif-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 145

ferent denominations of Christians. Separate
colleges for women are numerous, and doors open
to both sexes are found from ocean to ocean.
The little faculty of a half dozen professors has
grown in many instances to hundreds, and the
meager endowments now amount to hundreds of
millions of dollars. The most of these institu-
tions, all except the State Institutions, have been
founded, and supported, and endowed by private
benevolence, a benevolence which has been born
of prayer and kindled in the churches of Jesus
Christ, Christian men and women contributing
often out of their poverty that knowledge may be
placed within the reach of all the youth of the
land, and that an educated ministry may be raised
up to be the leaders of our churches and guides
of the people in the way of true wisdom. Some
gifts for educational purposes in the latter part of
the century have been little less than fabulous, and
are without a parallel in the history of the world.
The motto of Harvard University, the oldest of
them all, Christo et Ecclesiac, may be truthfully
inscribed over every college gateway, as expres-
sive of the Christian spirit and purpose of its
founders. Surely a Christianity which has
brought forth such rich and abundant fruit has ac-
complished something for the enlightenment of
mankind, and is worthy of grateful recognition

146 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

as one of the potent forces in our advancing civili-
zation.

That eminent litterateur, Bliss Perry, says,
" American faith in education, as all the world
knows, has from the beginning gone hand in hand
with faith in religion; the school-house was almost
as sacred a symbol as the meeting-house; and the
munificence of American private benefactions to
the cause of education furnishes to-day one of the
most striking instances of idealism in the history
of civilization."

It should be remembered that even the State
colleges and universities which have been founded
and are supported by public funds, have been
created by an appreciation of the value and neces-
sity of higher education for the welfare and prog-
ress of the people, which has been fostered by
the churches of Jesus Christ. President James B.
Angell says, in " Selected Addresses," " For the
most part the direction of education has been in
the hands of the church. Now whatever criti-
cism may be made upon the church through these
eighteen centuries, she has with impartial hand
held wide open to men, of high and of low degree
alike, the gates of generous learning. She has
encouraged and persuaded the rich to endow her
schools and colleges and universities, so that the
instruction might be almost, if not entirely, free.

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 147

She has taught them to found scholarships, which
would enable the poorest boy to spend the best
years of his youth and manhood in the still air of
delightful study." He might have added, should
a Professor in a college so far forget himself as
to speak disparagingly of the Christian church,
he is ungratefully condemning the generous bene-
factor to which he is indebted for his education,
his living and his opportunity.

But our churches through their inspired rep-
resentatives have not only been in most wise and
generous ways seeking to overcome the ignorance
of the world, but they have been faithfully and
sympathetically ministering to the want, the sor-
row and the misery of the world which they have
seen about them, and are doing it to-day with an
increasing zeal and a far reaching activity. The
nineteenth century may be characterized as par
excellence the philanthropic century. There never
was a time when the disciples of Christ followed
more closely or in greater numbers in the foot-
steps of their divine Master, who ever went about
doing good, than during these recent years.
There never was a time when the practical sympa-
thy of Christ found more beautiful or abundant
illustrations than in our day. It is true, painfully
true, that selfishness and forgetfulness and cold-
ness still live in too many hearts which profess to

148 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

have been warmed by the love of the Saviour.
But the church as a whole has proved itself to be
the friend of the poor, the sick, the suffering, the
wandering, the needy of all classes and conditions,
and its members have gone forth to found not
only institutions of learning, but institutions of
charity and philanthropy of every name, hospi-
tals, asylums, homes for the aged, the orphan,
the friendless and the wayward. All those whom
the heathen and Christless world has neglected and
abandoned, the Christian church has adopted as
its peculiar care. These are some of the things
that distinguish our Christian civilization and
make it Christian.

A well known English writer has truthfully
said, " All that we call modern civilization in a
sense which deserves the name, is the visible ex-
pression of the transforming power of the Gos-
pel."

Dr. Lyman Abbott has recently declared, in
" My Fifty Years as a Minister," " Looking back
upon the history of the church or abroad upon its
present work, the church is seen as an inspiration
to practical helpfulness. The church was the
first distributor of charity to the poor; the first
builder of hospitals and asylums; the first minister
to the sick and suffering; the first founder of
schools for the education of the common people.

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 149

And it is still. It is the church which has sent
doctors and teachers to foreign lands; the church
which has introduced medicine and surgery into
China, India, Africa; the church which has es-
tablished, first, schools for the primary education
of the children, and then, colleges for the higher
education of adults, in lands where there was either
no educational system, as in India, or none which
really educated, as in China. It was to the church
that the army looked in the Civ^il War for the es-
tablishment and maintenance of the Christian and
Sanitary Commissions; it was to the church that,
after great battles, calls were sent for bandages,
medicines, nurses, doctors and delicacies for the
hospitals.

That the world agrees with me in thinking that
the churches are springs of practical benevolence
is indicated by the fact that the pastor of every
town and city church of any considerable size gets
every month, often two or three times a month
(and often two or three times a week) appeals for
help for some practical benevolence or some moral
reform."

And not only by organized institutions of Chris-
tian charity, but by a quiet personal ministry of
which every pastor knows. Christian men and
women are busy performing deeds of mercy, help-
fulness and love. There are undoubtedly in-

150 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

stances of suffering which do not come to the eye
of the Christian pubHc, and distressing cries which
reach no ear. There are conditions which can
be changed and Improved only by wise and author-
itative legislation, which can be brought about only
by slow processes. But the great body of the
church, in spite of some unworthy exceptions, are
animated to a good degree by the spirit of Christ,
or at least by a sincere purpose to walk worthy of
their high calling. It is this that furnishes the
basis for the hope that as the religion of Jesus con-
trols the spirit and the conduct of men, there will
be realized on earth the divine ideal of human
brotherhood.

An American professor and writer on Socialism
is reported to have said in an address before a
Christian Convention, " Throughout Western
Christendom there has been a long struggle of the
people towards political liberty and social brother-
hood. It was often blind, sinful, brutal, as every
great movement of humanity has always been.
Yet God was in it. But the churches that exist
for the very purpose of establishing the reign of
justice, peace and brotherhood have with fatal
persistence ranged themselves on the other side.
This is the great moral stumbling block beside
which all intellectual difficulties of belief in Chris-
tian doctrine are insignificant. It has produced

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 151

more alienation from religion than all other causes
combined." If this accusation means or includes
Christendom in this Western hemisphere it is
utterly without foundation. Here social brother-
hood has to a large degree accompanied political
liberty. The churches of the largest denomina-
tions in the United States are practically social
democracies. Their members to a very large ex-
tent belong to the humbler walks in life, to the
laboring classes, or are those who have limited in-
comes. There are few millionaires or semi-mil-
lionaires among them, and those are not the in-
heritors of large unearned properties, but such as
have come up from the lower strata of society,
and by industry, economy, thrift and, for the most
part, honest toil and enterprise have accumulated
what they possess. It can be asserted confidently
that the sympathies of the churches are uniformly
with the laboring classes, when they observe the
laws of the land and the rights of others, and do
not *' blindly, sinfully, brutally " endanger the
peace and stability of the social order. Anything
else is inconceivable, for the members of the
churches are largely the laboring classes.

There is sometimes manifested an unjust and
unreasonable antagonism against wealth and those
who possess it, without which all commerce and
industry and large philanthropy and missionary

152 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

enterprise would be impossible, and society would
resolve itself into a lifeless and unprogressive
agrarianism. We are living in a time of extrav-
agant, not to say insane assertions. Some would-
be leaders in this social crisis seem to care not so
much to instruct wisely and to generate calmness
of judgment, as to arouse unrest and passion and
class-hostility. A Christian minister who had
abandoned the pulpit for the socialist's platform,
publicly declared that " Every poor man is a
robbed man," an assertion as absurd and inde-
fensible as it is criminal and dangerous. Poverty
is often the result of incompetence, folly or waste-
ful dissipation. A. C. Benson is authority for the
following Incident in the life of Charles Kingsley.
He was once traveling in the United States and
met a newspaper editor who said to him, " Mr.
Kingsley, I hear you are a democrat. Well, so
am I. My motto Is, Whenever you see a head
above the crowd, hit it." " Good heavens! " said
Kingsley, commenting upon the remark, " what a
ghastly conception of human equality, to attempt,
not to raise everyone to the level of the best, but
to boycott all force, all originality, all nobility,
and to reduce all to a dead level! If that is de-
mocracy, I am no democrat." That pugilistic edi-
tor seems to have a large following, all of whom
do not occupy editors' chairs; whose conception of

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 153

democracy is the overthrow of the prosperous in
order to exalt the less favored, whose method is a
leveling down instead of a leveling up, and who
mistake violent hostility against the rich for gen-
uine and helpful sympathy for the poor. Unless
there can be a wiser spirit introduced into the
discussion of social questions, and the use of more
temperate and saner language, the discussion will
not only be utterly futile of good, but will lead to
widespread social disaster. Some teachers and
preachers who profess to be the friends of the
church and the social order, are proving themselves
to be the worst enemies of both by their unwar-
ranted and incendiary language. They are blind
leaders of the blind, aye, worse, they are playing
with the inflammable passions of men, and inciting
to riot and anarchy. What is needed is not aliena-
tion and distrust and enmity, but mutual under-
standing and sympathy and good will.

A recent writer, himself a Christian teacher,
discussing the church and socialism, says, " The
church is to-day in large part a collection of people
who thank God that they are not as others —
even as this socialist! The indifferent Priest and
the hard hearted Levite still throng the highways,
but to many a man who has fallen among robbers,
and has been bruised and beaten and left half
dead, no good Samaritan comes with his oil and

154 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

wine. The church is too busy holding conven-
tions and saving the heathen to attend to such
small matters at its doors." Such language com-
ing from the pen of an infidel and a bitter and
mentally and morally unbalanced socialist would
not be surprising, for he hates both the church and
missions to the heathen. But a sober second
thought on the part of the author and a better
acquaintance with the Immense and increasing ac-
tivity on the part of many of our churches In
ministering " oil and wine " would have prevented
such a wholesale and unjust criticism. Any candid
survey of the philanthropic and charitable move-
ments of the last century, and an acquaintance with
the work of practical sympathy In which our
churches are constantly engaged will convince any
man that this has been a prominent characteristic
of the visible life of Christianity. Our Young
Men's Christian Associations and Young Women's
Christian Associations, with all their excellent and
far reaching service, have been generated by the
teaching of the Christian pulpit, and have been
sustained and made efficient by the presence, the
prayers, and the devotion of the men and women
of the churches. Take away that presence, and
those prayers, and that devotion, and their fine
buildings, expensively equipped, erected in every
city, would quickly be in the market for sale; in-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 155

deed without these they would never have been
built. The truth is, that all these existing philan-
thropies and charities which are the glory of our
modern civilization, organizations and societies
of every name for the relief of suffering and for
moral prevention, are simply so many forms of
church-activity. The church of Jesus Christ with
the religion which it embodies and the life which
it imparts, is the inspiring and prolific mother of
them all. To withhold from the church its just
dues is as culpable as it is to bring false charges
against it.

Professor William Adams Brown of the Union
Theological Seminary states a fact too little recog-
nized, when he says, " Long before our modern
economists had begun to tell us of the dependence
of vice upon an unfavorable social environment.
Christian missionaries had established in the slums
of our great cities centers of helpfulness and sym-
pathy which were a practical demonstration of this
truth . . . And to the darkest and most destitute
regions of the earth the hospital, the workshop
and the school have been carried by men and
women who have been sustained in the sacrifice
and renunciation which the task required, by their
faith that the little they were able to do to help
men here was so much contribution towards pre-
paring them for an eternal destiny." Again he

156 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

says, " There are many persons to-day who are
ready to recognize the beneficent work done by
foreign missionaries for the social welfare of the
peoples among whom they have been working,
who have no sympathy with the religious motives
which animate them. Why, they ask, can we not
have the hospital and the school without the doc-
trines that go with them? They forget that it is
faith in the realities which the doctrines express,
which alone has made the missionary enterprise
possible. Had it not been for the belief that man
is an immortal spirit, capable of communion with
God and meant for fellowship with Him through
all eternity, we should have had no Livingstone
or Moffat or Paton."

Possibly there may be here and there an exclu-
sive, self-centered, heartless and unspiritual
church, blind to the great verities of its professed
faith, which is irresponsive to the appeal of a lost
world, and holds himself aloof from the common
tide of human life which goes moaning and sob-
bing by. But the general spirit of the followers
of the divine Son of Man has been:

" Let me live in my house by the side of the road,
And be a friend to man."

The appeal of a needy and distressed humanity
has been invariably to the Christian community,

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 157

and has not been wont to be refused when rehef
was possible. It was the dictate of the plainest
wisdom, confirmed by the result of past experience,
that prompted the friends of the ancient cripple
to carry him daily at the hour of prayer, and lay
him by the Beautiful Gate of the temple, where the
throngs of worshipers would pass to and fro.
It is the religiously inclined in whose bosoms the
divine sympathy throbs. The friends of a suf-
fering Christ are uniformly the friends of a suffer-
ing humanity.

But what shall be said of the influence of the
Christian church and its teaching during the last
century upon public and private morals? No one
who is familiar with the ethical ideals of Jesus
will question their pure and exalted character and
their insistent demand for righteousness in per-
sonal character and in all human conduct and re-
lations. All ethical systems of acknowledged
worth are based upon the teachings of Christ.
Did the church of the nineteenth century enforce
those teachings as part of its divine message, or
was the pulpit ministration such as to obscure their
importance and weaken their power? In other
words was the evangelicanism of the fathers non-
ethical? This question is raised by reason of the
supposed contrast between the preaching of the
past and the preaching of the present. Formerly,

158 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

it is said, the emphasis was laid upon doctrine,
while now it is laid upon practice, formerly upon
creed and now upon life.

This supposed contrast is largely imaginary,
and grows out of an entire misapprehension of
the facts. The fathers did preach doctrine, but
rarely or never as an end in itself. It was uni-
formly as a means to fullness and integrity of life.
It would be easy to show from their voluminous
sermons which have been preserved, with their
numerous inferences, applications, improvements
and practical lessons that they were not wont to
disconnect truth from life, doctrine from personal
obedience and righteousness. The following clear
and distinct utterance was made as long ago as
1811 at the meeting of the Warren Baptist Asso-
ciation for that year, and may be accepted as an
illustration of the all-round preaching which in
a large degree characterized the century. The
italics are the author's. " But while the Scriptures
enjoin the absolute necessity of faith unfeigned,
with no less decision do they affirm that those who
believe must be careful to maintain good works.
True faith always works by love and purifies the
heart. Nothing can be adapted more effectually
to produce the fruits of righteousness than a
hearty belief of the truth exhibited in the Bible.
The Gospel is a grand expedient in which the wis-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 159

doni and glory of Ciod arc displayed in recovering
men from the dominion of sin. No person can
have more real religion than he has practical re-
ligion. He that doeth righteousness is righteous,
and he only. The grace of God which bringeth
salvation, teaches its possessors to deny ungodli-
ness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, right-
eously and godly in this present evil world . . .
Faith in Christ as the root, and obedience to his
commands as the branches, constitute the true
plant of our Heavenly Father's planting."

Christ taught, " You shall know the truth and
the truth shall make you free," not only free from
error and superstition, but free from the power
and dominion of sin. Christ prayed for his dis-
ciples in his last recorded prayer, " Sanctify them
by the truth ; thy word is truth." The fathers took
Christ at his word, believing that the truth of
Christ, the doctrine of Christ, alone had renewing
and sanctifying power. It was not the creed ac-
cepted merely by the intellect, but the creed
wrought into the life, that they had in view. Be-
lievers were to be " living epistles." By their
fruits they should be known and judged. If they
preached the necessity of faith in Christ as a di-
vine Saviour, it was because He would save his
people from their sins, from their power as well as
their penalty. If they held up Christ on the cross

i6o THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

in full atonement, they joined believers in Christ
with Him in his crucifixion, crying " How shall we
who are dead to sin live any longer therein?"
If they preached the virgin birth of Christ, they
proclaimed the absolute necessity of a new birth
into a spiritual life in order to see the kingdom of
God. If they preached the resurrection of Christ
as the crowning article in the Christian faith, it
was that men might experience the moral power
of that resurrection, and rise to newness of being.
If they preached the doctrine of justification by
faith, they were quick to say, while it is your faith
in Christ that justifies you before God, it is your
righteous and obedient life that will justify your
faith before God and men. If they preached
much of Heaven and its eternal glories, it was be-
cause they knew that no man can live this life as
he ought, without feeling the uplifting and sanc-
tifying power of the world to come constantly on
his soul.

They put first things first, the cause before the
effect, the prescribed means before the desired end.
They did emphasize doctrine that they might se-
cure life. They did emphasize doctrine, because to
ignore it was fatal to life. Christ said, " The words
that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are
life." And so they spoke them unto men, pregnant
with divine doctrine, throbbing with divine life,

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST i6i

that they might have here and now the true and
abundant life which Christ came to give. Well
will it be for the church and the ministry of to-day
and to-morrow and the next day, if they follow the
examples of the fathers, which brought large in-
crease to the people of God and crowned the
century with gracious revivals. A leader in the
recent " men and religion forward movement "
declared that if his denomination, the Congrega-
tionalist, did not lay greater emphasis upon the
soul's conversion by the Spirit and truth of God,
it would soon die out. The continued existence
of Christian churches depends upon the continued
proclamation of revealed truth and the continued
insistence upon a vital spiritual experience, which
consists in the soul's communion with God through
a personal faith in the crucified and risen Christ.
Without these there may be social clubs, fraternal
orders, benevolent societies, philanthropic organi-
zations, but Christian churches after the New Tes-
tament pattern are doomed to extinction. Chris-
tianity is doctrine as well as life, and all permanent
Christian life must have its roots in the unchang-
ing truth of Christ. Men will soon cease to talk
about " applied Christianity," unless they con-
tinue to hold fast to a definite, positive Christian-
ity which they are to apply.

Doctrinal preaching has always produced moral

i62 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

results. Froude in his essay of " Calvinism " de-
clared (and he cannot be charged with undue
prejudice) that Calvinism produced character, and
that whatever of moral fiber the English and
Scotch people possessed was due to the Puritan
preaching of Calvinistic doctrine. Froude's
exact language is, " Whatever exists at this mo-
ment in England and Scotland of conscientious
fear of doing evil is the remnant of the convic-
tions which were branded by the Calvinists into
the people's hearts." Dr. William E. Griffis de-
clares, " Calvinism with its democratic spirit, in-
tense love of liberty, high ideals, and austere
morals was mighty in shaping the minds of the
men who made the Dutch Republic, the English
Commonwealth, New England and the Scotland
and North Ireland of public schools and an edu-
cated peasantry." The earlier and later testimony
of historians is in exact accord, and voices the un-
varying consensus of opinion.

In a review of a volume entitled " Nine Great
Preachers," by Dr. A. H. Currier, beginning with
Chrysostom and ending with Phillips Brooks, four
of whom are well within the memory of living
men, viz., Robertson, Beecher, Maclaren and
Brooks, it is said, " The boldness with which all
these preachers denounced the sins of their times
IS strikingly apparent in these biographies; while

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 163

the elevated standard of morality which they pro-
claimed shows them all, and the class to which
they belong, to be lineal descendants of the great
lawgiver of Israel, who by divine sanctions en-
forced a morality far higher than any which can
be obtained by mere legal enactments." Certainly
in the preaching of the great preachers of the
church doctrine and ethics have not been di-
vorced.

The results of doctrinal preaching have been
seen in a positive as well as negative morality.
The nineteenth century revealed in several respects
a remarkable progress in moral sentiment in our
country. The system of human slavery, which
had rested like a menacing curse upon the land,
and came near dismembering the nation, went
down, not so much by reason of the demand of the
Civil War (that was only the providential occa-
sion) as before the uprising and onward march of
aroused moral sentiment. The abolitionists had
their mission, but the growing sense of the injustice
and wrong of the system, felt by many Christians
in the South as well as the North, voiced in many
Christian pulpits, journals and conventions, was
at last victorious, and the abnormal institution
disappeared forever from our free land.

Dr. Lyman Abbott, to quote again from his
Reminiscences which refer to the history of both

i64 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

the temperance and the slavery agitations, says,
" That the church has sometimes been laggard in
moral reform movements is true; but it is not
true, as is sometimes affirmed, that it has been in-
different. Dr. Lyman Beecher's ' Six Sermons on
Temperance ' were among the causes which
brought about the great temperance movement in
this country. There was not in the anti-slavery
reform, from any body of lawyers, doctors, mer-
chants or scientists, any utterances analogous to
the petition signed by three thousand clergymen of
New England against the Nebraska Bill, allowing
the extension of slavery." These are specimen
illustrations of moral sentiment which was finding
expression in pulpit and pew constantly during
the last century.

As early as 1787 the Warren Baptist Associa-
tion which embraced the Baptist churches through-
out New England, passed a resolution condemning
the traffic In slaves. This is thought to be the
earliest of many denunciations of slavery by re-
ligious conventions in the North. During the first
half of the last century many Influential citizens
of the South openly declared the system of slavery
to be *' unjust," " unchristian," " cruel," " dis-
graceful," " diabolical," " a black stain," " a ter-
rible calamity," " a moral and political evil," " an
evil greater to the master than to the slave."

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 165

This was especially true of prominent leaders in
Virginia. In the year 1845 the Baptist General
Convention for Foreign Missions, having been
one body for thirty-one years, was torn asunder,
making two bodies, a Northern and a Southern,
because the Appointing Board resident in the
North, refused in response to an inquiry from the
Alabama Baptist Convention, to appoint slave-
owners as missionaries, " lest it become respon-
sible for an institution which it could not with good
conscience sanction." The Civil War brought de-
struction to the system, triumph in a way little
expected to the vigorous moral sense of the peo-
ple, and immortal glory to the name of Abraham
Lincoln; and in due time came healing and a more
permanent union to the dismembered denomina-
tions of Christians. Now no sane man is so insen-
sible to the demands of justice and the inalienable
rights of humanity as to defend the ancient wrong.
The practice of gambling by lottery which pre-
vailed so extensively a hundred years ago, and was
resorted to without a blush, by the authorization
of legislative enactment, in works of public im-
provement, in securing funds for the erection of
public buildings and even Christian sanctuaries,
is forever ostracized by reason of the pronounced
condemnation of educated Christian sentiment. In
some forms gambling still survives, and though

i66 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

sometimes protected by official corruption, it is
under the ban of statutory condemnation like other
crimes and vices, and lives in the dark, shrinking
from discovery and criminal prosecution.

The following statute was passed by the Legis-
lature of the State of New York, April 13, 18 14:

" An Act instituting a lottery for the promotion of literature
and for other purposes.

Whereas well-regulated seminaries of learning are of im-
mense importance to every country and tend especially, by the
diffusion of science and the promotion of morals, to defend and
perpetuate the liberties of a free state.

Therefore

I. Be it enacted by the people of the State of New York,
represented in Senate and Assembly, that there shall be raised
by lottery, in successive classes, a sum equal in amount to the
several appropriations made by this act.

$100,000.00 for the benefit of Union College.

$ 40,000.00 for the benefit of Hamilton College.

$ 40,000.00 for the benefit of Asbury African Church
in the City of New York to pay a mort-
gage and establish a school.

$ 30,000.00 for the benefit of the College of Physicians
and Surgeons, and certain provisions for
the benefit of Columbia College.

See Elihu Root's Yale Lectures on "The Citizen's Part in
Government," pp. 105, 106.

The intemperance that was so rife even in
Christian circles in former days, so that no build-
ing could be framed, not even a college or a
church, and no day's work could be done in field

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 167

or shop, without the use of intoxicating liquor, and
hospitality even to a clerg)'nian was not complete
unless it was furnished, is now a mark of moral
degeneracy, and more and more by constantly in-
creasing public sentiment restrictive laws are being
placed upon our statute books in reference to its
manufacture and sale. Rev. William Goodell,
D.D., an honored missionary of the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to
Constantinople, describes in his " Memoirs " the
social conditions which prevailed in his boyhood in
the Puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
An eminent clergyman consulted a physician in
great perplexity of mind. In his pastoral work
as he visited the sick and the dying, comforted
'mourners, prayed with the aged and guided in-
quirers, wherever he called on these sacred er-
rands liquor was offered to him, which in order
not to give offense he felt bound to take. After
a few calls " his head was invariably affected, so
that he found himself in danger of saying or do-
ing some foolish thing. Could the doctor pre-
scribe something for him to take in siich frequent
emergencies?" The doctor's only prescription
was, when his head was thus affected, the clergy-
man should go home while he was still able to
walk, and remain until the dizziness had passed
away. " The idea of total abstinence seems not

i68 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

to have entered the mind of either of them.
That he must drink was taken for granted, or give
unpardonable offense. In those days everybody
drank, old and young, rich and poor, male and
female." Dr. Goodell relates another incident,
in which he himself, then a boy, had a prominent
part. A godly man, who like his own godly par-
ents believed in the Assembly's Catechism, together
with " the reasons annexed to the whole Ten Com-
mandments " was wont to call at his home " to
confer with his parents about the prophecies in
general and the millennium in particular," and the
great missionary enterprise which was then be-
ginning to engage the thoughts of Christians. No
conference ever closed without glasses of toddy
or mugs of flip, varying according to the season,
" the sugar at the bottom being always reserved
for the longing palates of the children." On one
occasion when the godly man called, the parents
were absent, and Dr. Goodell says, " I felt it be-
came me as the oldest son of the family to treat
the servant of the Lord with all due respect." He
therefore undertook to make for this good man
the customary glass of toddy. " On tasting it I
thought it too strong and put in more water with
sugar to match. Tasting it again I thought it was
too weak and too sweet, and therefore made an-
other change and still another." And so he con-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 169

tinued tasting and changing, and changing and
tasting until he had prepared a large bowl full,
and had lost all idea of how it ought to taste.
The good man drank a part, and gave the children
his blessing, advising them to put the remainder
of the liquor aside until their parents returned.
They were ashamed to have their parents come
home and see what remained, and to throw any
of " the good creature " away would be quite
wicked, and so they undertook to reduce the quan-
tity remaining, and drank until, as the doctor
says euphemistically, " their heads turned around."
He adds " I presume that the children of to-day
would know a more excellent way of honoring the
servants of the Most High God; but those were
days of darkness." There are far too many peo-
ple in nominally Christian communities who still
love darkness rather than light. But it is incon-
ceivable that such scenes could be repeated in
Christian homes to-day. Several States and large
sections of many others have passed prohibitory
and no-license laws, which are executed as suc-
cessfully as any laws against vice and crime.
Many citizens are urging such laws, as a distin-
guished educator in the South said, on the simple
ground of self-protection, for the protection of
life and property against those made insane by
drink. It is stated that fifteen millions of our

170 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

people are livang in nine states under Statewide
prohibition, or about one-sixth of the entire popu-
lation. In twenty-five states more than fifty per
cent, of the territory is dry, and in thirteen states
more than seventy-five per cent, is dry. An im-
mense amount of literature portraying the fearful
evils of alcoholism from a physical and economical
as well as moral standpoint, has been published
and widely circulated. Temperance societies and
anti-saloon leagues are vigorously and patiently
at work, hoping In due time by means of an awak-
ened moral sentiment to have a controlling voice
in the national politics.

A mighty work of reformation still remains for
the church of Christ to do for the salvation of the
bodies and souls of men from the destroying In-
fluence of Intoxicating drink, and the removal of
this formidable obstacle to the progress of the
kingdom of God. The terrible judgment needs
to be loudly and constantly proclaimed from every
pulpit in the land — " No drunkard shall enter Into
the kingdom of heaven," whatever his position in
the social scale; and the lofty principle of Chris-
tian self-denial and true brotherhood needs to be
urged again and again — "If meat make my
brother to stumble, I will eat no flesh forevermore,
that I make not my brother to stumble." The
progress of the past in sentiment and determina-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 171

tion to abolish this great evil prognosticates the
final victory. It needs to be added that unless
labor-unions incorporate a temperance plank into
their platforms and conscientiously live up to it,
and unless reformers and socialists of every name,
Christian and anti-Christian, grapple and strangle
the drink-habit which is the prolific source of
waste, poverty, misery, degradation, vice and
crime, they are only playing with reform and so-
cial betterment. The following confession of the
result of personal observation is from the pen of
Carroll D. Wright, that eminent student of eco-
nomics: " I have looked into a thousand homes
of the working people of Europe; I do not know
how many in my own country. In every case, so
far as my observation goes, drunkenness was at
the bottom of the misery, and not the industrial
system or the industrial surroundings of the men
and their families." Phillips Brooks once re-
marked that if intemperance could be wiped out,
there would not be poverty and misery enough
left to keep our Christian charity in healthy ex-
ercise. The temperance movement, which was
born of the activity of Christian men and women,
is still largely in their hands. The church of
Christ is not yet completely aroused, to its shame
be it said; but when the church in which resides
the omnipotence of God and through which He

172 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

works, shall present a united and aggressive front
to the opposing forces of evil, viz., social customs
in high life, heartless greed, enslaving appetite
and a subsidized secular press, they will go down
before it.

Moreover, whatever moral instinct has existed
in the hearts of the people, whatever inborn sense
of right and justice, the church of Christ has
quickened, interpreted, enlightened, enforced and
energized it, so that the church by its ministra-
tions, and by the consistent lives, examples and ef-
forts of its members has been the chief promoter
of public moral sentiment and civic righteousness.
One has only to imagine the condition of a com-
munity, a city or a nation, in which the moral in-
fluence of the church has never been felt or should
be blotted out, to form an idea of the indebted-
ness of the general public to its preservative and
beneficent power. Men who ignore or repudiate
the authority and teachings of the religion of Jesus
Christ, are enjoying in their homes, in their social
and business life and in the undisturbed privileges
of citizenship the incalculable benefits of its ac-
tive presence. The moral influence of the Gospel
permeates all walks and conditions of life. Christ
still comes to his own, though his own receive him
not. What Harold Begbie says of his nation is
equally true of America. " Materialism in Eng-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 173

land is saturated through and through with the
ethical ideals of Jesus; our intellectual agnosticism
is moral with the inexpugnable leaven of Christian-
ity." It can be said with absolute confidence that
the world is a better world to live in than the
world of a hundred years ago, and that it is a
better church which lives in it, with a vastly better
equipment, and a more aggressive spirit, and
higher ideals of its life and mission.

A recent issue of " The Christian Work and
Evangelist " contained the following positive ex-
pression of its belief. " We believe that never
in any period of the world's history was the church
making more earnest effort than it is to-day to
reach the people and to build up the kingdom of
God. In half a million churches next Sunday
Christ will be truly preached. There never was
so devoted and passionate humanitarianism mani-
fested as the church to-day is exercising. Never
has the church shown such enthusiasm for the
kingdom of God in the world."

Professor George W. Knox of the Union Theo-
logical Seminary says, in " The Gospel of Jesus,"
" Never before was the Gospel of Jesus in its
sincerity so widely recognized and followed; never
before was there such enthusiasm in the service
of humanity; never before did so many powers

174 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

combine for the doing of the Father's will on
earth."

These testimonies are samples of innumerable
expressions of belief that might be adduced.
They voice the very general conviction of think-
ing men, based upon a candid and comprehensive
survey of the religious conditions of the world and
the progress and present activity of organized
Christianity. A narrow view, limited to certain
local and variable aspects, may sometimes be dis-
heartening; but a broad outlook upon society and
the world will confirm and strengthen the faith
and courage born of the positive, unmistakable
and repeated promises of the Almighty in refer-
ence to the triumph of his Kingdom.

There are a few people, among whom is a small
body of Christian interpreters, who believe that
the world is constantly growing worse, and that
even the church of Christ is becoming more cor-
rupt and increasingly false to the teachings of its
divine Master. Sometimes these interpreters
seem almost jubilant in their pessimistic belief,
for according to their interpretation of Scripture
prophecy, these conditions foretoken the speedy
personal coming of Jesus Christ in judgment. It
is declared that " the church is in a pitiable condi-
tion," " It is daily growing weaker," " it Is In fact
dying, and its occasional spasms of righteousness

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 175

are only the galvanic twitching of its stiffening
members." The inevitable effect of such a belief
is to paralyze all Christian effort, to silence the
voice of prayer, to destroy faith in the saving
power of the Gospel of Christ and in the pur-
pose of Christ to endow his church with such
strength that the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it, and to extinguish all hope in the full,
glad coming of his kingdom and its triumph over
all the kingdoms of the world. Such a belief,
as if it was an integral part of the programme of
Christ, is gloomy beyond expression. To rejoice
in it would be unnatural and inhuman.

Few men can be found who will endorse the
astonishing assertions of Alfred Russel Wallace,
contained In his recent volume entitled " Social En-
vironment and Moral Progress." He says, " I
have come to the general conclusion that there has
been no advance either in intellect or morals from
the days of the earliest Egyptians to the keel-lay-
ing of the latest Dreadnaught." Again he says,
" It Is not too much to say that our whole system
of society Is rotten from top to bottom, and the
social environment as a whole, in relation to our
possibilities and our claims, is the worst the world
has ever seen." Such utterances are the blindest
and wildest utterances of a pessimistic socialism,
which sees no progress in the human race, and has

176 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

no faith in the forces that have been working for
its advance, and have produced a Christian civiH-
zation. And what is worse, Mr. Wallace has
only one remedy for the conditions which he thinks
he sees, and that is a remedy out of which God
and religion have been eliminated.

When men thoughtlessly, or in a hostile spirit,
or in mistaken sincerity dwell upon the imagined in-
effectiveness of Christian churches, they are blind
to the fact that they are universally the homes of
individual and social purity, that they are the ex-
ponents of righteousness in doctrine and in life,
that they hold up persistently the highest ethical
standards, that they are as a solid sea-wall to
protect communities against the encroachments of
vice and crime of every description, and that in
them is deposited the hope of the world's redemp-
tion. Judge Lewis L. Fawcett of Brooklyn has
made this significant revelation of personal ex-
perience. " Approximately 2700 cases have been
brought before me in my five and a half years of
service on the bench. During all this time I have
never had to try a man who was at the time of
the alleged offense, or ever had been, an active
member of the church." Similar testimony has
been given by a judge in Chicago, before whom
have come many divorce suits. He said,
" Rarely, almost never, were the parties to a di-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 177

vorce suit active church workers." The question
arises whether the apparently careful emphasis
laid in both instances upon the activity of the
parties, and by implication upon the lack of it, is
not suggestive. An idle profession may be no
certain protection against wrong-doing. Judge
Fawcett added, — " I have asked each young crim-
inal who came before me, if he was a member or
an attendant at a Sunday School, and I have never
been answered Yes. . . . When by means of sus-
pended sentence I have seen fit to give young pris-
oners opportunities to lead better lives, I have in-
sisted that the first thing they must do is to join a
Sunday School."

A leading religious editor commenting on these
remarkable testimonies to the restraining influ-
ence of organized Christianity, said — " It really
looks as though the Christian church quite sufli-
clently justified its existence to the nation merely
as a preventive of crime, a barrier against relapse
into barbarism, a police agency in preserving
order, a preservative of common virtue and de-
cency. We believe any careful student of sociol-
ogy and morals will sustain Judge Fawcett's state-
ment that the church is a great curb on crime.
Furthermore, we believe that he would agree that
It Is the wall which holds the race from falling
back into primeval habits and criminal instincts.

178 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

. . . Most of our respectable, attractive commu-
nities of high moral tone are so because the church
of Christ is there. Our beautiful towns are what
they are, instead of hotbeds of vice, drunkenness
and crime, because the church of Christ is there.
. . . Were not the town predominantly Christian,
crime would make it Impossible as a home. There-
fore every man In the community owes a debt of
gratitude to the church. He profits from it,
whether he serves It or not. It Is better burglar
Insurance than Insurance companies. It makes the
streets safer for his daughters. The stronger the
church Is, the cleaner, healthier, safer, happier,
more respectable the town. If every man were in
the church, it would save most of the expense for
police, judges, lawyers and courts. Judge Faw-
cett tells us that crime now costs us $700,000,000
a year. It would cost us hardly any of that. If all
were In the churches. Really the man who Is
living In our crime-free, respectable towns, and
does nothing for the church, Is living on charity.
He is profiting from the church's curb on crime,
but is giving nothing In return." The Christian
church Is the greatest moral as well as spiritual
force In the community. The first question of an
educated man who owes his education in no small
part to the generous gifts of the Christian public,
should be, not what can I get out of the church,

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 179

but how can I help it, and increase its power for
good. Otherwise unless the selfishness of his heart
has been brought under the control of the higher
motive, his education has failed in its noble pur-
pose.

A clergyman in a Western city, desiring to know
the views of intelligent laymen upon religious
faiths and problems, propounded a list of ques-
tions to 120 of "the most prominent business
men " of his city, and published a summary of their
answers. One of the questions pertained to the
church and its influence in the world. The follow-
ing is his report of the answers returned. " Not
one unkind criticism or weak indorsement of the
church was received. Appreciation of the church
was comprehensively and startlingly expressed.
Witness the following: The church stands first
in the world's institutions for the good of mankind
in every relationship of life; the church is the foun-
dation of civilization, and is doing great good; the
world would be lost without churches; without the
moral teachings of the church the world's degen-
eration would inevitably follow; it is the keystone
of social order, society would be chaos without it;
it uplifts the world and does away with vice; it
teaches that, regardless of future reward, morality
pays, not in money or glory, but in all that makes
a man satisfied with himself; it creates and keeps

r8o THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

alive high ideals; the example of its members in
living right is of great value; it emphasizes the
spiritual against the material; it elevates, softens,
soothes and comforts humanity; it keeps us close
to God." These are the candid judgments of
men of business, who live in the midst of life and
its practical affairs, and are able to estimate the
influence of the churches upon personal character
and social conditions. Such testimonies can be
duplicated in every city in the land, and the fact
has convincing weight with all unprejudiced minds.
It is well to remember the often quoted rebuke
said to have been uttered by James Russell Low-
ell, when minister to the Court of Saint James,
in the presence of a group of literary men, some of
whom were boasting that they and the rest of the
world could get on safely without the religion of
Christ. " When the keen scrutiny of skeptics has
found a place on this planet where a decent man
may live in decency, comfort and security, support-
ing and educating his children unspoiled and un-
polluted, a place where age is reverenced, infancy
protected, womanhood honored, and human life
held in high regard, — when skeptics can find such
a place ten miles square on this globe, where the
Gospel of Christ has not gone before, and cleared
the way, and laid the foundations that made de-
cency and security possible, it will then be in order

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST i8i

for these skeptical literati to move thither, an(3
there ventilate their views. But so long as these
men are dependent on the very religion which they
discard for every privilege they enjoy, they may
well hesitate to rob the Christian of his hope and
humanity of its faith in the Saviour, who alone
has given to men the hope of eternal life, which
makes life tolerable and society possible, and robs
death of its terrors and the grave of its gloom."
It is said that Dr. Horace Bushnell was once
appealing to a man of wealth for a contribution
towards the erection of a church in a new town in
the West, and urged his appeal by saying that the
existence of a Christian church would minister to
material values in a community as well as to pri-
vate virtue and public morality. When the man
of wealth questioned the truth of his statement.
Dr. Bushnell quickly asked him, " What would
your real estate be worth in Sodom?" The
Christian church is the conservator of all values,
material as well as moral and spiritual. A vital
godliness has been and will continue to be our only
safeguard against misrule and anarchy. The ex-
istence of vice and crime, of political corruption
and vicious legislation, of fraud and graft, of op-
pression and wrong, continues to curse the body
politic, only because the Prince of Peace and
Righteousness has not yet been allowed to have

i82 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

full sway among the people. The disciples of
Christ have made their influence felt mightily, and
by no means in vain, but the full victory is yet in
the future. The progress of moral sentiment in a
community is not to be judged always by the con-
tinued existence of certain evils. The truer
criterion is, what is the attitude of the public con-
science towards them? Are these evils unrecog-
nized and condoned, or are they recognized and
condemned? The gross exhibitions of moral de-
pravity, in high places and low, which now and
then startle the community, serve to reveal the
vigorous moral sentiment of the people, which in-
variably expresses itself in swift, positive and un-
mistakable condemnation.

It should be added as one of the moral achieve-
ments of the last century, that the Hague Court,
established for the peaceable settlement of inter-
national disputes which until very recent years
were wont to be submitted to the arbitrament of
cruel and barbaric war, which settles nothing ex-
cept the superiority of brute force or power of en-
durance on one side or the other, is a conspicuous
illustration of the progress of a Christian civili-
zation and has been secured largely through the
enforcement of Christian principles and the tri-
umph of Christian sentiment. Already in a large
number of instances disputes have been amicably

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 183

adjusted by means of this Court, and the enor-
mous waste and cruel suffering of war have been
avoided. If the last century had been distin-
guished for nothing else, this new tribunal and its
remarkable success would have made it illustrious.
It has a conspicuous place in the divine programme
of the coming of the kingdom. It has brought
perceptibly nearer the prophetic time, when under
the reign of the great Prince of Peace " nation
shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall
they learn war any more."

In general it may be affirmed that the church
of Christ to-day occupies a higher ethical ground
than ever before, and that the last century has
lifted the ideals of Jesus for individual and per-
sonal life, for society and for human government
to a more conspicuous and luminous place in the
judgment of thoughtful men than in the past,
as the supreme standard of conduct and life for
man in his every relation, and as the divine law
which is to govern the kingdom of God on earth
and in Heaven.

Luther's interpretation of the practical nature
of the Christian religion, viz., " Good works fol-
low redemption as the fruit grows on the tree,"
has certainly been the prevailing belief of Protes-
tant Christianity. The great preachers and the
great revivalists of the last century have empha-

1 84 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

sized honesty and integrity of character as a neces-
sary sequence of personal faith in Jesus Christ,
and their preaching has often been followed by
marvelous exhibitions of voluntary restitution and
reparation of wrong on the part of converts.
Men who have been brought into right relations
with God have hastened to come into right re-
lations with their fellow men. The epistles of
Paul and the epistle of James have been accepted
as of equal authority and as integral parts of the
one divine Gospel proclaimed by Christ, whose
legitimate, whose expected, whose genuine fruits
would be regenerated men,

" Whose faith and works are bells in full accord."

Our ablest theologians have believed that to
draw a distinction between the writings of Paul
and Christ or of Paul and James to the disparage-
ment of Paul, as if his writings were lacking in
ethical force, is to misunderstand utterly the great
apostle. Dr. Galusha Anderson has well said —
" One has but to run his eye over Paul's epistles
to be convinced of the utter incorrectness of this
charge. Very much that he wrote was for the
very purpose of correcting unchristian conduct.
The twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth chapters
of Romans are wholly ethical. First Corinthians
deals almost entirely with Christian morals. The

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 185

eighth and ninth chapters of Second Corinthians
are devoted to the duty of giving. In Ephesians
whole chapters are solidly ethical. A large space
in Colossians is also. And so it is, in different
degrees, in all Paul's letters. Moreover, moral
precepts are scattered through all his doctrinal
discussions. Paul was always earnestly and in-
tensely practical. His aim in every argument was
to secure right thinking and consequently right
conduct. His doctrines flowered and fruited into
duty."

President E. Y. MuUins says, " If the reader
will turn to the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth
chapters of Romans and compare these with the
Sermon on the Mount, he will be struck with the
resemblances." Dr. Sanday expresses the same
view in these words, " To these verbal resem-
blances must be added remarkable identity of
teaching in these successive chapters." And
Knowling, as quoted by Dr. Sanday, adds, " In-
deed it is not too much to add that the Apostle's
description of the Kingdom of God reads like a
brief summary of its description in the Sermon on
the Mount."

If additional testimony Is needed to the preva-
lent belief that the ethical teachings of Paul are in
full harmony with those of Christ, the following
striking quotation is taken from the able volume

1 86 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

of R. W. Livingstone on " The Greek Genius and
its Meaning to Us." " Turn to the close of one
of his epistles, where with warning and encourage-
ment, with argument and exhortation, the apos-
tle is urging on some infant community the prac-
tice of the Christian virtues. One on the heels of
another, his precepts come tumbling out, breaking
impetuously into questions, reinforced by quota-
tions, by adjurations, by appeals to his personal
appearance by prayers, by tears. It is difficult to
select single instances from Saint Paul, for the
whole of his epistles are instinct with a feeling
which, except perhaps for certain passages in Plato
and Euripides, is absent from Greek literature, a
passionate hunger for righteousness, a passionate
indignation against those who frustrate it. He
overflows in enthusiastic denunciations. Of sex-
ual vice he writes let it not be once named among
you. Of avarice he says that the covetous man
has no inheritance in the kingdom of God. . . .
Everywhere he is insistent in season and out of
season, without regard of consequences, to con-
demn evil. For him Christ can have no concord
with Belial."

Whatever may have been the failures of the
Christian church in the nineteenth century, for fail-
ures as well as successes have marked the progress
of the years, they have not been the result of

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 187

a misunderstanding of the teachings of Christ and
his apostles, or of a lack of faith in their applica-
bility to all the conditions of human life, or in the
divine sufficiency of their remedial power, a faith
which Christian experience has served only to
strengthen and confirm,

" New occasions teach new duties." Social
conditions have arisen, of which the fathers never
dreamed, — strife between capital and labor with
fault on both sides, in many instances the oppres-
sion of the poor and powerless, the hardships of
toiling women and children, the unsanitary condi-
tion of the modern slum, the glaring inequalities
which exist in society, the colossal corruption in
high places, and the prevalence of nameless and
shameless vices. These conditions present new
and serious problems in new lights. They widen
the application of the Gospel of Christ, and fur-
nish new fields for the enforcement of its right-
eous and humane principles. But the Gospel is
the one divine and all sufficient remedy. To
abandon the remedy prescribed by infinite Wis-
dom, and think to change evil conditions by simply
changing environment, or by an analytical study
of the disease, or by enacting legislation without
changing the moral character of men and women,
would be to rub the empty bottle on the diseased
part, and expect by so doing to effect a cure. So-

1 88 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

ciology is the one study that can least get on with-
out a vital Christianity. A thoughtful writer has
said, " Law is great, but religion is greater, and
we shall have gained very little, if as the Arch-
bishop of York told the Congress of the Sanitary
Institute in his cathedral city, we produce a race
' physically fit, but spiritually, mentally and mor-
ally sterile.' It is i,n that direction that the danger
lies, and it is a danger to which we have as yet
given far too little consideration. There is abun-
dant room for that regeneration which is the only
effective and lasting antidote to degeneration."

Dr. Josiah Strong, speaking of " the new so-
cial ideal " which is being advocated in certain
quarters to-day, pronounces it " little more than a
millennium of creature comfort. It needs to be
elevated, illuminated and glorified by Christ's so-
cial ideal. It is quite possible for society to be at
the same time well housed, well fed, well clothed,
well educated, and well rotted. The world can
never be saved from misery until it is saved from
sin, and never ought to be. The ideal of Chris-
tianity is that of a society in which God's will is
done as perfectly as it is in heaven; one in which
absolute obedience is rendered to every law of our
being, physical, mental, spiritual, social; and this
is nothing more nor less than the kingdom of God
fully come in the earth."

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 189

President Augustus H. Strong says in " Chapel
Talks," " Christianity aims at both reform and
regeneration, but it puts cause before effect, re-
generation before reform." " Make the tree
good and its fruit good," says Christ. Much of
our modern socialistic propaganda, however, ig-
nores this logical relation, and thinks to purify the
stream without touching the fountain. He quotes
from Horace Mann who said, " One former
is worth a hundred reformers," and adds, " Let
us who are preachers take that comfort to our-
selves. We are set to purify the springs of hu-
man action, and that is a grander thing than to
direct the course of the stream after it has be-
gun to flow. Reform will come in due time, if
regeneration has only gone before. It is our busi-
ness to help on all true reform; but as ministers of
Christ, we can best do this by giving to the com-
munity truly regenerated men."

Prof. W. H. Maynard in an address before the
Colgate Theological Seminary on " The Twen-
tieth Century Preacher," says — " Had the Master
with his twelve legions of angels, deposed the
Emperor Tiberius, retired to private life every
corrupt official, enacted a perfect code of laws,
and appointed model officers for their enforce-
ment, and thereupon reascended to Heaven,
doubtless the old corruptions would have soon re-

I90 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

turned. It is a fact too generally overlooked,
that under any system righteousness will reign
only in proportion as men become righteous."

The following extracts from " A Warning " by
Professor Shailer Mathews have no uncertain
sound. " A danger to which Protestantism, par-
ticularly progressive Protestantism, in America is
exposed is that its churches shall become mere
agents of social service. . . . But we cannot let
social service take the place of God. ... A
Protestant church cannot be an ethical orphan
asylum; it must be a home in which souls are born
into newness of life. We want efficiency in or-
ganization and in activity. We want our minis-
ters to be alive to the needs of the hour, etc. . . .
But most of all does American Protestantism need
a spiritual passion, a contagious faith in the su-
premacy of God's spiritual order and an alarm
at the misery that waits on sin. From many a
community there is already rising a cry for ele-
mental religion. With all their scientific and
business success, American laymen are asserting
that they want to be assured of God and immor-
tality and the worth of righteousness. They
want companionship in spiritual loneliness, com-
fort in hours of pain, courage in moments of moral
wavering. Their souls are athirst for the Un-
known, and they will be satisfied with nothing

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 191

save the water that comes from the River of
God."

And Dr. J. H. Jowett utters a like warning
when he says, " Men may become so absorbed in
social wrongs as to miss the deeper malady of
personal sin. They may lift the rod of oppres-
sion and leave the burden of guilt. They may
seek to correct dislocations and overlook the awful
disorder of the soul."

The primary duty of the Christian church and
pulpit is supremely personal. It is not, as has
been said, to create an atmosphere merely favor-
able to the solution of social problems, nor simply
to proclaim a divine standard of life and conduct,
but it is to create Christian men and women, with
hearts touched by the divine life, with a clearer
vision of God's truth and man's duty, with an
earnest, self-denying purpose which will not be
satisfied with any superficial remedies or half-way
measures, but will seek in Christ's way to destroy
the works of the Devil and bring in the kingdom
of God; in a word, who will not only pray " thy
kingdom come," but will intelligently, prayer-
fully, unitedly, persistently labor to make it come.
Someone has said, " Produce great persons, the
rest will follow," whether persons or the condi-
tions which make for human progress.

It has been wisely remarked, " Not wells flow-

192 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Ing with oil, nor mines teeming with silver and
gold, nor plains covered with flocks and herds so
enrich a State as noble men and noble women,
equipped by training and culture to meet all the
demands and high opportunities of our Christian
civilization." The church of Jesus Christ in
these recent years has been especially fruitful,
not only in producing such noble men and no-
ble women, but in producing the Christian
civilization with its insistent demands and
its high opportunities. It has created both the
demand and the supply. The women of our
churches, as well as the men, have been enlisted
as never before in the varied activities of our
time, educational, philanthropic, reformatory and
missionary. Christianity from the time of its
introduction exalted woman to a place of equal
honor and responsibility in the family life; but
not until the last half century were there opened
to her the splendid opportunities of privilege and
of service which she now enjoys and welcomes.
It is as if she had come to a new emancipation.

It should be remembered that the men and the
women demanded by the times can be created only
by placing the emphasis upon the things of the
spirit, the being of God, the mission of his Son
Jesus Christ our Lord, the new life by the divine
Spirit, communion with the unseen and eternal,

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 193

the far vision that is not limited by the physical,
the earthly, the temporal. " In the world, but
not of it " is the secret of the highest life and
blessedness and power. He who would lift up
the world must have a life above it and a strength
superior to it. The world has become intensely
materialistic. The outward and visible crowds
out all thought of the spiritual and eternal. The
Christian church is the divinely appointed agency,
whose chief mission is to remind man of his higher
nature and minister to it. Its spiritual aim must
be paramount and overtop everything else. Its
spiritual message must ever be exalted to the place
of supreme importance. Man is more than flesh
and bones. Life Is more than meat and raiment.
To look no higher than physical needs and social
reforms Is to forget the divine Image and the glory
of true manhood. These ought you to have done,
and not to leave the other undone. The following
article taken from the platform of " The Federal
Council of the Churches of Christ in America,"
expresses clearly and succinctly the lofty ideal and
purpose of Christianity. " Christ's mission is
not merely to reform society, but to save it. He
is more than the world's Readjuster. He is its
Redeemer. The church becomes worthless for its
higher purpose when It deals with conditions and
forgets character, relieves misery and ignores sin,

194 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

pleads for justice and undervalues forgiveness."
Another has said, " The greatest service the
church can render to the community lies in the
message she proclaims. In the midst of organiza-
tions and administrations she is sadly impover-
ished, and the community is destitute indeed, if
she loses her lofty note of spiritual insight and
vision. The temporal passes away. She is to
reveal unto men the eternal. When she inspires
a man to hunger and thirst after righteousness,
when she imparts a glimpse of the invisible, when
she draws down from the heavenly places a little
of the unattained, she is setting the high ideal and
lifting humanity heavenward as no other agency
can do. To her it is given to preach the mys-
tery of Christ."

Has the church been doing this, and is it doing
it to-day? Is it seeking to fulfill its exalted mis-
sion, and with honest purpose and pure heart
striving to live up to its high ideals? Making
allowance for human weakness and possible cases
of self-deception, is its testimony clear and strong
to the spiritual and ethical nature of its mes-
sage? Is it deserving of the sharp criticism
which is sometimes heard in unexpected quar-
ters? The Christian teacher and author, al-
ready quoted, has publicly asserted that *' The
church maintains a splendid ideal of the king-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 195

dom, hut only as an ideal, something too spirit-
ual to be expected in this life, a hope for the
world to come, and as to this world it winks at
all injustice and iniquity." Again he asserted,
" To-day the church pardons, if it does not en-
courage, ways of doing business totally irrecon-
cilable with the Gospel and at variance with the
fundamental instincts of justice." These words
of sweeping condemnation from such a source are
as unjust as they are surprising, and are exceed-
ingly regrettable. They give countenance to the
bitter and blasphemous assaults of infidelity, and
confirm it in its hostility and unbelief. They im-
ply the possession of a knowledge which no man
possesses, and an absence of a charity which
every man ought to possess. There may be some
persons who bear the name of Christ, and un-
doubtedly are, whose business methods will not
bear the light of Christian morality or of com-
mon honesty, who " break God's laws for a divi-
dend," but to charge the whole Christian church
with being false to its profession, and sheltering
injustice and fraud, and with criminally encour-
aging and conniving at all iniquity, would be like
charging the eleven apostles with wicked com-
plicity with Judas in his base betrayal of his Lord.
Can the Christian ministry and the Christian
church in all its branches in our day be looked

196 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

upon as a generation of hypocrites, or as making
as empty profession of a religion of whose re-
quirements they are grossly ignorant or willfully
neglectful? Are not the great body of the dis-
ciples of Christ holding in reverent regard the
ethical teachings of their divine Master, both as
to the inner spirit and the outer conduct, and
acknowledging their binding authority, and are
they not humbly and conscientiously endeavoring
to incorporate them in living examples? Is not
the Christian pulpit universally demanding justice
and charity among men, and proclaiming loudly
and insistently, and with a wider application than
ever before, the high ideals of Jesus? Is not
the church devoting thought and strength in-
creasingly to moral reform and ever inaugurating
new methods of social betterment? Rev. Charles
Stelzle states (and no man is better informed),
" A study of over a thousand professional social
workers as to church affiliation shows that of those
who were associated charity workers 92% were
church members. ... As a matter of fact, the
church practically controls through its member-
ship nearly every great philanthropic movement
of any consequence. Glance at the list of direc-
tors and verify this statement. Practically all of
the money that goes to the hospitals, orphan
asylums, clubs and charitable institutions of

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 197

various kinds comes from the church people.
Without them these could not exist." The church
cannot justly be charged with indifference to ex-
isting needs and conditions. If there is any fail-
ure and any peril at the present time it is in spend-
ing the strength upon attempts to supply the needs,
while the fountain is allowed to remain corrupt,
seeking to change environment and conditions
without changing disposition and character, sub-
stituting outward comfort and decency for inward
godliness, in a word, allowing moral reforms and
social movements to assume an importance above
the fundamental truths of the Christian faith and
the sublime realities of the Christian experience.
Professor Royce of Cambridge says, in
" Sources of Religious Insight," " There are some
clergymen to whom the preaching of religion has
come to mean in the main the preaching of benef-
icent social reforms." But religion has to do
fundamentally with a man's spiritual and Immor-
tal nature. It anticipates the next world as well
as this. Even a man's life here cannot be saved
from weakness and failure, and be enabled to
attain unto its largest meaning and service by
purely human and external means. Workers in
social settlements are learning from experience
that back of all social reform that looks for suc-
cessful and permanent fruits, there must be the

198 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

religious faith with its regenerating and trans-
forming power. Indeed this is the supreme and
inspiring motive and divine method of all such
reform work. Another has said, " But giving the
merely social settlement all its due, there are still
many who believe that it comes far short of meet-
ing the deepest need. There are many who pro-
foundly believe that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ directly applied is the greatest uplifting
force known, even to social science, and that ex-
perimenting with ethical culture and social re-
forms without direct religious effort is, to use the
language of a noted missionary worker, trying to
elevate the masses without the elevator." All
true love to man has its roots in love to God.
The second commandment of the law, epitomized
by Christ, is inseparably connected with the first,
and grows out of it. The order is significant.
Christianity works from within outward, and not
vice versa. The divine order cannot be Inverted.
The fruit of the tree is dependent upon the life-
giving sap. Out of the heart are the issues of
life. Right living is dependent upon right be-
lieving and right thinking. To know God and
Jesus Christ whom He has sent is life, in its fullest
and deepest meaning, is life here and life here-
after. A man must first learn to sing out of an

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 199

intelligent appreciation and vital experience, with
Charles Wesley,

" Oh for a thousand tongues to sing

My dear Redeemer's praise,
The glories of my God and King,

The triumphs of his grace,"

before he can sing trustingly, lovingly and sub-
missively with Washington Gladden,

" Oh, Master, let me walk with Thee
In lowly paths of service free."

There is no antithesis in these hymns, but only
a natural and logical sequence.

In the preaching of the pulpit and in the work
of the church, it must not be forgotten that Chris-
tianity' deals primarily with the individual. Its
message is to the individual. Its command is,
" Follow thou me." It is to change social condi-
tions, determine public sentiment, root out iniquity
and every form of evil, establish righteousness and
peace and brotherhood on the earth, and bring in
the kingdom of God, as men one by one accept its
message and yield obedience to its commands.
For strong as is Christ's emphasis upon individual
discipleship, it is everywhere understood to have
far-reaching relationships. He himself declared,
" Ye, my disciples, are the light of the world.
Ye are the salt of the earth." Dr. Stalker has

200 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

called Christ " the discov^erer of the individual."
He was that, and He was more than that. He
was the revealer of the true social order, and also
of the divine method of its realization, an order
for which there is no adequate human substitute,
and an order based upon the worth of the in-
dividual soul and resulting from its spirit-quick-
ened life and its gracious activities. Whenever
the church of Christ has become formal and lost
its spirituality, when the salt has lost its savor,
it has been irresponsive to social needs or has
resorted to unscriptural methods for their relief.
The more spiritual the church has been, the more
sensitive it has been to human needs and the
swifter to respond to them. The methods of that
response, the outward forms of its activity, have
changed with the changing conditions; but what-
ever the forms of service undertaken, genuine
success has always depended, and will depend ever-
more, upon the vital principle and spiritual pur-
pose which inspire and pervade them all.

The past is often characterized as the age of
the individual, while the present is spoken of, by
way of contrast, as the social age, with its wide-
spread social sympathies and numberless social
activities. There may be some truth in this dis-
tinction, says Dr. Cleland B. McAfee, but there
is danger of its being overaccented. " There were

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 201

many of our fathers and grandfathers," he says,
" who were mightily concerned with the mass of
the people, and looked as carefully as we do for
a corrective of social evils." He adds as a con-
spicuous evidence of this fact, " The first English
translations of the Bible were fruits of the social
impulse." Tyndale said, " If God give me life,
the plowboys shall know more of the Scriptures
than you do." The same is true of the German
Bible of Luther. No movement of modern times
can compare with the enlightening, emancipating,
uplifting, equalizing, ameliorating influence of
that movement which gave the word of God to the
people in their native tongue. That social im-
pulse, born of a devout spiritual faith, was the
author of all that is good in our modern civiliza-
tion, and contained the prophecy of that perfect
social democracy for which the world still waits.

It is an acknowledged fact, then, that the Gos-
pel when rightly interpreted is individualistic and
socialistic in the truest sense, and at the same time.
" Exclusively it is neither; inclusively it is both."
Its individualism is utterly free from all taint of
narrowness or selfishness. Its socialism is di-
vinely spiritual. Its aim for the individual is
likeness to Christ, the perfect man, our elder
brother, in character and in life, and individual
perfection of character includes the recognition of

202 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

all social obligations and the practice of all social
virtues. Redeemed men will inevitably produce
a redeemed society and a redeemed humanity.
Dean Shailer Mathews of the Chicago Univer-
sity, in an admirable paper on the subject, " A
Strategic Movement for Baptists," with a sub-
title, " A Platform and an Opportunity," declares
in Article 8 of his Platform. " The individual
possessed of the Spirit of Christ is of supreme
worth. Baptists recognize no antithesis between
the individual and the social Gospel. They work
for the kingdom of God, and may be counted upon
to champion every advance toward social right-
eousness. But they insist that the individual Is
not to be lost In the mass, and that a regenerate
society is possible only when composed of re-
generate people. They therefore seek to de-
velop Individual lives into religious and moral ef-
ficiency rather than to superimpose upon them
religious authority or any form of ecclesiastical
aristocracy." Mr. R. H. Coates, an English au-
thor, in his volume entitled " Types of English
Piety," distinguishes the evangelical type from
the sacerdotal on the one hand, and on the other
from the mystical, In that " it seeks to approach
God through the redeemed conscience, the moral
will, and the establishment of the righteous State,"
and demands In the true saint not " the anaemic

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 203

and aureoled recluse," but " the full blooded and
effective citizen with a passion for the sovereignty
of God in the affairs of the world."

Though present-day Christians come far short
of attaining their sublime ideal, they are in a mul-
titude of instances prayerfully striving to make it
practical and real. Imperfect as the life of the
church may appear, when compared with the one
perfect Example of obedience, of purity and of
love, history records no higher level. The hum-
ble washerwoman exclaimed, looking upon her
washing as It hung upon the line amid the falling
snow, " Nothing can stand comparison with God
Almighty's whiteness." There Is, we must be-
lieve, a purity and integrity and completeness of
character yet to be secured. There are heights
yet to be won even In our present state of exist-
ence. The testimony of the living church is yet
to be a more potent and convincing force In the
regeneration of men and In the perfecting of so-
cial conditions. While the perfect life and the
perfect character and the perfect society are to
be realized in Heaven, when we shall see the great
Son of God as He is, and be like Him, this vision
and hope are not the lifeless dream of the mys-
tic, nor the Idle fancy of the visionary, but the
glorious Inspiration of the Christian believer, as
here and now he confronts God and man and

204 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

duty. It is everlastingly true that " he that hath
this hope in Him (that is in Christ) purifieth him-
self even as He is pure."

The kingdom of God or the kingdom of
Heaven, for whose manifestation the whole crea-
tion groaneth and travaileth in pain, is primarily,
and fundamentally, and essentially spiritual in its
nature. It is not to be identified with any ec-
clesiastical body or visible realm, and is not to be
brought about by organizations or reforms or
enactments or external rite or force, but by the
preaching of the Gospel received through per-
sonal faith. We need to remind ourselves con-
stantly of his conception of it, who came to earth
to establish it, and who alone as acknowledged
King has a right to define it, and power to estab-
lish it. To the Pharisees who thought only of
an outward visible kingdom, and demanded of
Christ when it should come. He answered, " The
kingdom of God cometh not with observation,"
and to the midnight inquirer He disclosed the
unalterable condition of admission into it, when
He said — " Except a man be born from above,
he cannot see the kingdom of God."

In conclusion, it may be said that a candid and
unprejudiced review of the recent progress of the
church of Christ and the substantial and outstand-
ing victories it has already won, and a just recog-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 205

nition of Its present life and spirit, its accumulated
power and increasing activity, will surely lead to
three results, viz. :

First, a profound sense of gratitude to God that
in spite of human frailty and imperfection, the
weakness, not to say the disobedience, of the hu-
man Instrumentality with which God works. He
has marvelously carried forward his kingdom in
the world, until the name of Christ is now highly
exalted in much of the thought, the affection and
the life of the nations.

Secondly, an unshaken conviction In the funda-
mental spiritual nature of Christianity, and in the
adaptability of the unchanging Gospel to meet
the deepest needs of the human heart, and to
furnish the only adequate solution for the ills
which now afflict or may hereafter afflict the social
organism.

And thirdly, a confident assurance that God's
promises will in due time be fulfilled to the letter,
that " in the name of Jesus every knee shall bow
of things In Heaven, and things in earth, and
things under the earth, and that every tongue
shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord," and that
" the kingdoms of this world shall become the
kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and He
shall reign forever and ever."

We may mourn over the sometimes apparently

2o6 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

slow coming of that kingdom, we may deplore
the coldness and indifference of many who bear
the name of Christ, we may long for a deeper
consecration of heart and life on the part of every
disciple, which beginning at the center of being
shall reach the outmost circumference of human
life and influence. But the forces of good are
mightier than the forces of evil. It is God's king-
dom, whose corner stone was laid at infinite cost,
in his unerring wisdom, before the foundation of
the world. " If God be for us, who can be
against us?" So long as God lives and reigns,
the issue cannot be uncertain. When Frederick
Douglass was once addressing a large convention
in Tremont Temple, Boston, in ante-bellum times,
and was portraying in dark and hopeless colors
the condition of his enslaved race, the voice of
Margaret Fuller, who sat behind him on the plat-
form, was suddenly heard saying, " Frederick,
Frederick, God is not dead."

We may not accept Browning's optimistic in-
ference in the present tense in which he put it —

" God is in his heavens,
All's right with the world,"

for many things are far from right in the social
order and in the moral condition of men. But
we may have such faith in God and in his invinci-

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 207

blc purpose, in the enlightening power of his
truth, in the active presence of his regenerating
Spirit among men, and in the efficiency and suf-
ficiency of the agencies which He has ordained
and through which He has promised to work, that
we can calmly and fearlessly affirm that in his own
good time all will be right with the world. " His
word shall not return unto Him void." The
battle with error and wrong and sin will not be
won by the timid and discouraged, but by the con-
fident and courageous. To detect the evils in
human society and the tremendous obstacles in
the way of the coming of God's kingdom is not
difficult, and requires no high order of genius.
To face them unflinchingly, and march " breast
forward, never doubting clouds will break," to
cry in the darkest hour as if the triumph was al-
ready secured, " thanks be to God who giveth
us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,"
that is noble, that is Pauline, that is Christlike.
Christ who was King in the realm of truth, the-
ocentric, redemptive and prophetic, said to his
trembling disciples, " Fear not, little flock, for it
is your Father's good pleasure to give you the
kingdom." There is no room for pessimism in
the Christian's vocabulary. His attitude should
always be one of courage and expectancy. Al-
ready he sees the dawn of that new day which

2o8 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

shall dispel all the darkness and sorrow of sin,
and gladden the whole habitable earth with its
effulgence. Back of all our timid praying and
feeble effort, and fronting the superhuman tasks
before the church of Christ, stands the purpose of
the Almighty, inscribed upon the uplifted cross,
and voiced in the predictions of Him who died
and rose again, and whose word cannot be broken.
To some men these predictions may seem to
be only an unsubstantial dream inspired by Jewish
hopes. " But they come to us to-day," said Presi-
dent Ewing in his eloquent address at the meeting
of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ire-
land, " as an integral element in his message to
mankind, and they assure us that through all
difficulties Christianity moves on to triumph, a
triumph the fruit of the Redeemer's sacrifice, a
triumph achieved not by worldly forces but by the
power that comes down from above, and they
identify that triumph with the personal exaltation
of Jesus upon a throne of ineffable glory. A
dream, is it? But the dreams of Jesus Christ
are the shaping forces of history. He dreamed
of Calvary, and his cross to-day is the hiding place
of sinners. He dreamed of resurrection — and
his open tomb is now the consolation of the world.
He dreamed of a church He would build — and
his church now worships Him in every clime. He

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 209

dreamed of his return to conquer and reign — and
amid all the turmoil of these latter days faith
hears his herald's voice, and sees the flashing of
his chariot wheels."

The following jubilant anthem recently ap-
peared in a publication in what was once darkest
India.

" There's a light upon the mountains, and the day is at the

spring,
When our eyes shall see the beauty and the glory of the King:
Weary was our heart with waiting and the night-watch seemed

so long.
But his triumph-day is breaking, and we hail it with a song.
In the fading of the starlight we can see the coming morn.
And the lights of men are paling in the splendors of the dawn;
For the eastern skies are glowing as with light of hidden fire,
And the hearts of men are stirring with throbs of deep desire.

There's a hush of expectation, and a quiet in the air.

And the breath of God is moving in the fervent breath of

prayer ;
For the suffering, dying Jesus is the Christ upon the throne.
And the travail of our spirit is the travail of his own.
He is breaking down the barriers, he is casting up the way;
He is calling for his angels to build up the gates of day;
But his angels here are human, not the shining hosts above,
For the drum-beats of his army are the heart-beats of our love.
Hark! we hear the distant music, and it comes with fuller swell,
'Tis the triumph-song of Jesus, of our King Emmanuel!
Zion, go ye forth to meet him! And my soul, be swift to bring
All thy sweetest and thy dearest for the triumph of our King! "

CHAPTER IV

PEACE AND LIGHT ON THE CROSS

An Interpretation

WE shall never be able to comprehend In this
life, and perhaps not in the life to come,
the extent of that humiliation and the depth of
that agony, when the great Son of God in the
form of a servant bore our sins in his own body
on the tree, and suffered the cruel death of the
cross in our behalf. But the end has now come.
The rejections, the betrayal, the arrest, the denial
and abandonment by his disciples, the mocking,
the scourging, the disgraceful trial, the hateful
sentence, the blackness of darkness, the pains of
the crucifixion, are now ended. After the pro-
longed and agonizing struggles Christ's soul finds
peace, and the enveloping clouds are riven by
rays of light. This new mental condition is in-
dicated by his words, " Father, into thy hands I
commend my spirit," and by the last brief utter-
ance which fell from his lips, " It is finished."
These are words of deepest significance.

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 211

What is finished? Not simply his physical and
mental suffering, and not merely his earthly life
among men. The word translated " finished "
means accomplished, not ended but fulfilled. It
is the same word which was used just before,
when it says, " Jesus knowing that all things were
now accomplished, that the Scripture might be
fulfilled, said ' I thirst.' " Christ's life, in all its
manifestations and experiences, was the accom-
plishment of an eternal purpose which culminated
on the cross, was the fulfillment of many distinct
prophecies which had been spoken by God's serv-
ants in the long ages, and was the completion of
an ordained plan for the salvation of the world.
TTiis was what Christ meant when He said, " It
is finished, or accomplished." This was the basis
of his peace. He looked upon a finished work,
a completed mission, a divine service for hu-
manity, in which nothing had been left undone,
in which there had been no failure, no omission,
no incompleteness.

" Life's work well done,
Life's race well run,
Life's victory won,
Then cometh peace."

And this it was that let light through the dense,
almost impenetrable darkness that enveloped the
cross. He who had just before cried in words

212 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

fraught with strange, mysterious meaning, " My
God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me!"
now says in loving, filial confidence, " Father,
into thy hands I commend my spirit."

Let us think for a few moments of what Christ
meant when He uttered those final words, " It is
accomplished." The Scriptures frequently as-
cribe the coming of Christ into the world and his
mission of salvation to the gracious and eternal
purpose of God. Christ's advent was no after-
thought. Christ's crucifixion was no unforeseen
tragedy of local significance. To make the Chris-
tian religion an affair of the first century of the
Christian era, or the natural evolution of the re-
ligious thinking of the Jewish race is to rob It of
its divine, its heaven-born, its God-born origin,
and to deny to it its repeated and exalted claims.
Back of the cross, and back of the life, and back
of the advent of Jesus Christ stood the purpose
and the grace of the Almighty. Calvary was
planned in the council chamber of Heaven. Are
we not told that " God so loved the world that
He gave his only begotten Son that whosoever
believeth in Him should not perish but have ever-
lasting life?" Did not Jesus say, " I came not
to do mine own will, but the will of Him that sent
me," and as He approached the end of his life,

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 213

did He not declare, " I have finished the work
which Thou gavest me to do "?

Christ's ministry of grace and suffering, from
beginning to end, from Bethlehem to Calvary, was
the fulfillment of a preconceived programme.
Peter on the Day of Pentecost told the crucifiers of
Christ that He was delivered to them according
to " the determinate counsel and foreknowledge
of God," which however did not relieve them of
their responsibility and guilt, for they had taken
Him, and " by wicked hands had crucified and
slain Him." Christianity is older than the Chris-
tian era, yes, older even than the human race.
Christ was " the Lamb slain from before the
foundation of the world." The message of the
gospel is God's message, clothed with divine au-
thority and grace and power. When Christ hung
upon the cross of Calvary his soul found rest in
the thought that the eternal purpose of the Father
was at last accomplished.

But more than that; all along through the ages
that purpose had found expression in numerous
prophetic utterances and in significant rites and
symbols. Beginning in the garden where man
fell, and continuing with little interruption until
the last prophet had spoken for God, the hopes
of men were pointed to the coming Saviour. The
books we call the Old Testament, which contain

214 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

the sacredly preserved records of God's dealings
with his ancient people, are all aglow with
promises of a divine Deliverer, who should
" preach deliverance to the spiritually captive, the
opening of the prison to them that are bound, and
proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." Be-
tween three and four hundred distinct prophecies,
interpreted as referring to Christ by Christ him-
self and his apostles, and by the devout scholar-
ship of the world, point to his birth, to his spirit,
to his character, to his mission, to his sufferings
and their purpose, and to his death and resurrec-
tion. Christ's portrait was drawn, his mission
foretold, his character portrayed, his biography
outlined, before He entered Mary's humble home
in far Judea. Christ recognized the portrait and
bore witness to its genuineness and accuracy, say-
ing again and again, " That the Scriptures may be
fulfilled," " These are they which testify of me."
To the sorrowing and disappointed disciples,
mourning over their crucified and buried Master
He said, " Ought not Christ to have suffered these
things and to enter into his glory? And begin-
ning at Moses and all the prophets He expounded
unto them in all the Scriptures the things concern-
ing Himself." " One jot or one tittle," He said,
" shall not pass away till all be fulfilled."

The Old Testament and the New Testament

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 215

stand or fall together. They are bound together
by the living personality of Him who was Son
of God and Son of Man, child of prophecy and
subject of history. Prophecy points forward to
reality, and reality answers back to prophecy. As
has been said, " The New Testament is concealed
in the Old, and the Old Testament is revealed in
the New." Neither can be adequately under-
stood without the other. If one is the lock, the
other is the key. If one is the image in the
mirror, the other is the glorious form and face.
If one is the blessed hope and longing, the other
is the full and perfect realization. If one is the
bud, the other is the consummate flower. If one
is the voice of God by his ancient prophets, the
other is the Word of God made flesh in his Son
Jesus Christ our Lord. And so the suffering
Christ could say peacefully at last, when He
thought of the long line of splendid prophecy
stretching through the ages, with which He was
perfectly familiar, *' It is accomplished."

But once more. God's eternal purpose being
fulfilled, and the ancient prophecies to the mi-
nutest detail being also fulfilled, Christ could now
look upon his mission to earth for the revelation
of God's grace and the salvation of lost men as
fully accomplished. He had the peace which
comes from the consciousness of a perfect life

2i6 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

and a completed service. He had left nothing
undone. He had failed at no point. His cru-
cifixion by which He had offered Himself a sacri-
fice for the sins of the world, was the culmination
and the crowning of his life of sinlessness and
self-sacrifice, just as his resurrection would be the
crowning of it all, when He should be " declared
to be the Son of God with power." He could now
say, " Now lettest Thou thy Son depart in peace,
for I have accomplished and made known thy
salvation. Thou canst now be just and the justi-
fier of all who repent and believe. Whosoever
shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be
saved." The way is now open from earth to
heaven. The method of the world's salvation is
now perfected, and needs no amendment or sup-
plement. All the moral and spiritual conditions
have been met. The provisions are ample for all
nations and for all ages of the world. The
shadow of the cross of Jesus Christ shall fall with
healing power upon every land and to the last
syllable of recorded time. " Enough for each,
enough for all, enough forevermore." And so
Christ could now say to his disciples, " Go ye, go
ye into all the world and preach my Gospel to
every creature," the unchangeable Gospel of God's
infinite love, of which the cross shall be the per-
fect and enduring symbol. This was the supreme

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 217

element in Christ's satisfaction. He became a
perfect Saviour, able to save to the utmost all that
come unto God by Him.

Christ's words were, indeed, words of divinest
wisdom and truth, and have enriched the thought,
the faith and the literature of the world. All
students of philosophy and ethics and religion will
ever sit at his feet. " No man ever spake like
this Man." But Christ was more than a teacher.
His spirit and life were absolutely perfect, with-
out stain or flaw, able to bear the closest and even
the hostile scrutiny of men, and to receive the
full commendation of God, illustrating the highest
morality and the divinest purity. He was " the
brightness of the Father's glory and the express
image of his person." He was pronounced
" holy, harmless and undefiled, and separate from
sinners," that is. He constituted a class by Him-
self, the very image of Deity, the typical, the
unparalleled Man. Conscious of his moral in-
tegrity He could challenge the whole world,
without fear of contradiction, " Which of you con-
vinceth me of sin? " Yet Christ was more than
an example of righteous obedience to the holy and
perfect law of God. If that was all He was, He
would have been no Saviour for sinners, but only
a new and higher law of life, a perfect mirror to
reveal human imperfection and shortcomings and

2i8 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

guilt, a holy Judge whose words would be only
words of condemnation for us all.

Christ laid special emphasis upon his suffer-
ings and death as the supreme evidence of the
forgiving grace of God and his own Saviourhood,
and as providing the sure basis of all hope of per-
fect character and of eternal life and blessedness.
" Ought not Christ to have suffered these things? "
" The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep."
" The Son of Man came not to be ministered
unto but to minister, and to give his life a ran-
som for many." " And I, if I be lifted up from
the earth (on the cross) will draw all men unto
me." Here was the magnetic power, the divine
attraction, the resistless charm of the Son of God.
Here was the judgment, and at the same time the
atonement, of human guilt. Here was the all-
conquering grace of the Almighty. Here was the
sure foundation of the world's immortal hope. A
year without passion week would be an empty
mockery in the calendar of the Christian church;
passion week without Good Friday would be pow-
erless in the appeal to God or to men.

When the apostle writing to the Hebrews said,
" Jesus was made a little lower than the angels
for the suffering of death . . . that He by the
grace of God should taste death for every man,"
he proclaimed the sufferings and death of the Son

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 219

of God to be the end, the object, the purpose of
his humihation and mission to earth, the ordained
completion of his earthly ministry, the crowning
act of his redemptive work. And when he added,
" For it became Him ... in bringing many sons
unto glory to make the Captain of their salvation
perfect through sufferings," he referred not to
Christ's personal character, as is sometimes er-
roneously supposed, for the moral character of
Christ was absolutely sinless and needed no per-
fecting, but he referred unquestionably to his
official character. He was made a perfect
Saviour, the victorious Captain of our salvation,
by his sufferings and death on the cross of Cal-
vary. And so Christ " endured the cross, de-
spising the shame, for the joy that was set be-
fore Him." He put Himself under the great law
of life and productiveness. " The hour is come
that the Son of Man should be glorified. Verily,
verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall
into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if
it die It bringeth forth much fruit." This is the
ordained, the heaven-prescribed condition to which
Christ submitted. First the cross and the shame,
then the crown of joy and the offered salvation;
first the buried seed and then the abundant har-
vest; first the agony and death and then the peace
of an assured and world-wide victory. As the

220 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Saviour at that final moment looked upon his fin-
ished work, and saw the strong foundation now
laid for the spiritual temple of believing souls,
Himself being the chief corner stone, and beheld
in prophetic vision the great multitude of those
who in all lands and ages should accept his
invitation, and trust in his redeeming blood, one
can almost hear Him say calmly, peacefully, tri-
umphantly, " It is accomplished."

And such peace of soul had for its accompani-
ment " the light that never shone on land or sea."
The darkness which had grown denser and denser,
is now broken. After a starless night the dawn
flashes up the eastern sky. The golden light is
the light of the Father's countenance in loving
approval, whose words of endorsement, heard at
the beginning and then again at the middle of
Christ's public ministry, " This is my beloved Son,
in whom I am well pleased," we may well be-
lieve fell softly on Jesus' ear at this time also.
When Christ said trustingly " Father," the Father
smiled approvingly, " My Son." It is the light
of the upper home and the many mansions, where
no night is, because no sin or sorrow enters there.
It is the light of that ineffable glory which Christ
had with the Father before the world was, and
(may we not say it?) the light of that greater
glory which is to be, when love's redeeming work

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 221

is done, when the cross and passion of Christ have
borne their legitimate and promised fruit, and
when the children of light shall all be gathered
within the walls of that heavenly city of which
the apostle John says, " It had no need of the
sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the
glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the
light thereof, and the nations of them which are
saved shall walk in the light of it, and the kings
of the earth do bring their glory and honor into
it." Then will our risen and glorified Saviour
say with a new emphasis, " It is accomplished."

The cross of Christ can never be repeated or
duplicated. In its sacrificial relation to divine
law and human guilt it stands alone. Christ was
both priest and sacrifice. He offered Himself
once for all. " After He had offered one sacrifice
for sins forever He sat down on the right hand
of God." Yet we are told that in some true sense,
even in his sufferings, Christ is an example for
his followers. " Because Christ also suffered for
us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow
his steps," language which means as the context
clearly shows, that the spirit which Christ mani-
fested in his supreme sufferings, the spirit of
meekness, patience and unmurmuring submissive-
ness, is to be manifested by his disciples in the
lesser sufferings which they may be called to en-

222 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

dure. And again Paul says to the Colossians, In
striking language, " Who now rejoice In my suf-
ferings for you, and fill up that which is behind
of the sufferings of Christ in my flesh for his
body's sake, which is the church." The progress
of Christ's kingdom Is to be accomplished by the
consecration and the self-sacrifice of those who
bear his name. The spirit of the cross must enter
into all true, acceptable and successful life. He
who would follow Christ and carry on the work
of Christ, must take up his cross and follow after
Christ. As Lightfoot says with an intelligent ap-
preciation of the apostle's words, " The church
is built up by repeated acts of self-denial In suc-
cessive generations. They continue the work
which Christ began." They fill up that measure
of service and self-sacrifice and suffering which
the sufferings of Christ have left for those who
come after Him to do. But as Lightfoot con-
tinues, " The Idea of expiation or satisfaction is
wholly absent from the passage." The true fol-
lowers of Christ who are carrying on their hearts
the burden of the world's redemption, are so
identified with Christ that their sufferings are his
sufferings, and their work is the continuation of
the work which He inaugurated, and so they come
to know " the fellowship of his sufferings " as
well as " the power of his resurrection."

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 223

Is this the ordinary Christian experience? Do
we know Christ as a suffering Saviour? Is his
cross so wrought into our lives that when we
come to the end of life his peace shall be our
peace, and his light shall be our light? If we
would know Christ In his exaltation we must know
Him In his humiliation. To rejoice with Him In
his glory we must watch with Him in the garden
and weep with Him at the cross. No story could
be more graphic or more pathetic than the story
of Christ's last days on earth, the clear vision of
the cross, the deepening shadows on his sensitive
spirit, the scorn and rejection of men, and the
unbroken darkness which rested down upon Cal-
vary's summit and its expiring sufferer. Surely,
we say, He became for us " a man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief." But have our hearts been
stirred within us? Have the emotions of peni-
tence, of sympathetic appreciation, of gratitude,
of love and devotion been kindled In our souls?
Shall we go forth from such meditations to a larger
service of self-denial for Him who kept nothing
back, but loved us unto death? Is not our re-
ligion too often coldly intellectual, reaching not to
the deeper sensIbiHtles of the spirit, and producing
no permanent results In the conduct and life?
How calm and cool we are, and apparently un-
moved, while we think of the great Son of God

224 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

pouring out his life on the cross! Do we not
wickedly repress and stifle our emotions, if we
have any? We are absorbed in our petty cares
and pleasures, and think little of the sinless, suf-
fering Christ and the supreme tragedy of human
history, which was enacted for us. We talk of
the common trials and burdens of life as if they
were " crosses." It is a pitiful travesty of the
word. The cross is the symbol of intense suffer-
ing, of total self-sacrifice, of the pouring out of
life unto death. And so we come to measure the
great cross of Christ with its immeasurable wealth
of meaning and its unspeakable agony by the in-
significant " crosses " of our personal experience,
as we call them.

We may not have fallen so low in spiritual dis-
cernment and in religious fervor as the England
of the eighteenth century, of which an historian
says, " The Church as a whole, at this period, was
cold and its teaching rationalistic. The living and
present Christ seemed to be left out of its theology.
The necessity of conversion was not brought home
to the people. Enthusiasm or zeal was repressed.
The Archbishop of Canterbury warned Heber,
setting out on his glorious missionary career in In-
dia, to put down enthusiasm. It was, we read, an
age of artificial formality, of self-satisfied enlight-
enment, of material prosperity and lethargy. Like

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 225

a malarious fog, it crept into the church, and laid
its cold hand upon her heart."

I do not forget the hopeful movements of our
day, the young people's uprising, the splendid ac-
tivity of many Christian women, the effort to
spread the missionary spirit which is the vital
spirit of Christianity, indeed without which there
is no Christianity, and '* the men and religion for-
ward movement," in which a part of the follow-
ers of Christ are enlisted. But Christ died alike
for all. His sufferings were endured for all. His
cross makes its appeal to every sincere and thought-
ful heart. His dying love should kindle respon-
sive love in every living, breathing soul. " We
love Him because He first loved us "; equal love
for souls equally needy demands a response
measured only by individual ability and capacity.
We are apt to lose ourselves in the multitude.
W^e make the love and the sufferings of Christ so
general in their scope as to weaken the force of
the individual application. The application should
be strongly and tremendously personal, as at the
conversion so all through the Christian life and
experience. It is not enough to say " God so
loved the world." No man ever yet found the
peace of forgiveness who did not feel the flame
of God's love focused by the lens of Christ's cross
on his own soul. And no man ever yet accom-

226 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

plished much for the kingdom of God, who did
not live under the ever present inspiration and
resistless impulse of the apostolic conviction,
" who loved me and gave himself for me." This
burning conviction, this personal appropriation of
the benefit of Christ's passion, will keep the heart
glowing with a true, self-sacrificing, consistent, un-
dying devotion to the divine Lamb of Calvary.

We sing with some degree of warmth, it may be.
Dr. Holmes' fine hymn,

" Grant us thy truth to make us free,
And kindling hearts that burn for Thee,
Till all thy living altars claim
One holy light, one heavenly flame."

And then before the echo of our song dies upon
the ear, we lapse into a state of almost refrigera-
tor coldness and forgetfulness and inactivity. Our
faith often finds sympathetic utterance and con-
firmation in our Christian hymns, which are filled
with the music of redeeming love. Our beliefs
and our aspirations, our creeds and our hopes are
wedded in the songs of the sanctuary. With sub-
dued hearts and tearful eyes we sing,

" We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains He had to bear;
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there."

Do we honestly believe it, and does that belief in-

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 227

rtame our love, and move us on to ever fresli purity
of life and constant acts of self-sacrificing and
loyal devotion? We sing tenderly,

" Oh, dearly, dearly has He loved,

And we imist love Him too,
And trust in his redeeming blood.
And try his works to do."

Do we honestly try, and are our efforts crowned
with any degree of success, so that we can truly
affirm that " we know Him and the power of his
resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings,
being made conformable unto his death "? Oh,
that our meditations upon the passion of Christ
may kindle in our hearts a holy, a burning passion
to be like Christ, to make known Christ, and to
know and to do the will of our Father who is in
heaven, as Christ did! May we strive to live up
to the standard of our confession expressed in our
hymns. May our Christian songs sing themselves
into our lives.

It is sometimes said, as if it was a sign and evi-
dence of progress, that the emphasis to-day in the
Christian world is not upon faith but upon life,
not upon doctrine but upon practice. This re-
veals a strange, dangerous and culpable forgetful-
ness of the incontrovertible fact that Christian life
is born and nourished by Christian faith, and noth-
ing else, that behind all acceptable practice and

228 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

sustained activity there must be a firm and intel-
ligent and loving grasp of the vital and essential
doctrines of Christianity, viz., the supernatural
birth and lordship of Jesus Christ, his miracle-
working power, his sacrificial death on the cross
and his bodily resurrection. The rationalistic
periods of history have been the dead periods of
history. The churches that have ignored or de-
nied the true nature and mission of the Son of
God, have been the inactive, non-missionary, fruit-
less and stagnant churches. It is evermore true
that " as a man thinketh so is he." A decay of
faith will inevitably result in the weakening of
life. You cannot keep the stream full, if you dry
up the fountain. Power will not long continue if
you break connection with the dynamo. A living
faith in the sinless and crucified Son of God is the
only sufficient inspiration to personal and church
activity and spiritual success. " By this sign con-
quer."

Dr. Gore, Bishop of Oxford, protesting against
the present tendency to belittle faith in essential
truth while seeking to meet the demand for an en-
larged outward activity, declares substantially,
" We are not going to enrich our action by the
impoverishment of our thought. A skimmed the-
ology will not produce a more intimate philan-
thropy. We are not going to become more ar-

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 229

dent lovers of men by the cooling of our love for
God." And Dr. J. H. Jowett in his Yale Lec-
tures, discussing the multiplication of organiza-
tions to the neglect of " the vital, the inspirational,
the divine," says, " We may be absorbed in de-
A'ising machinery, and careless about the power
which is to make it go. That is our peril."

The cross of Christ must always be the distin-
guishing symbol of the Christian religion, as it
has been for nineteen centuries, conspicuous in its
architecture, central in its creed and in its preach-
ing, proclaimed in its two permanent rites, vital
and vitalizing in its life, the secret of its progress
and the ordained promise of its final conquest and
world-wide triumph. " God forbid that I should
glory," exclaimed the spirit-enlightened apostle,
*' save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." A
sad day will it be for the Christian church, if it
ever loses its relish for such hymns as these:

" In the cross of Christ I glory,"

"Rock of ages cleft for me,"

" My faith looks up to Thee,
Thou Larab of Calvary,
Saviour divine."

President E. Y. Mullins has said, " In every
age of Christian power and aggressiveness the
cross has been prominent. Christianity possesses

230 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

an unrivaled view of God and the universe, a
matchless system of ethics. It would probably
live and eventually overcome all other religions
for these reasons alone. But its most distinctive
characteristic, the one thing which has always
given it supreme regenerating power in the indi-
vidual and in society, is its crucified Redeemer.
Liberal Christianity has popularity and ethics and
culture; evangelical Christianity has transforming
power. It was the message of the cross that gave
Paul his power; it is the cross that lends power
to the preacher to-day; and it is probable that the
message of the cross, truly believed and sincerely
preached, will continue to be the supreme power
in Christian history to the end."

We shall all come down to the end of life, as
did Christ. May we come down to it in peace
and in light, as He did? We shall not be able to
say then, " I have finished the work, which Thou
gavest me to do," for all human work and achieve-
ment are marred by weaknesses and imperfections.
As we take the backward look we shall be com-
pelled to confess, notwithstanding our most stren-
uous endeavor, " We have done the things we
ought not to have done, and have left undone the
things we ought to have done." Our peace will
not be the peace that comes from entire satisfac-
tion with the work we have accomplished and a

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 231

consciousness that we have lived a life of perfect
obedience to the will of God. Yet we may have
the peace of Christ in our hearts, the peace that
comes from fellowship with Him, and a participa-
tion in the rich blessings of his purchased salva-
tion. He made peace, we are told, " by the blood
of his cross," and is now made unto all sincere be-
lievers " wisdom and righteousness, sanctification
and redemption," so that we can sing in fullest
confidence,

"Thou, O Christ, art all I want;
More than all in Thee I find."

The fact and the method are clearly revealed.
" Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace
with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Even
now amid the storm and stress of life's experiences
we have foretastes of that peace which passes
all understanding, which is satisfying in its nature
and eternal in its duration. Surely Christ did not
mock his sorrowing disciples when He said to
them, " Peace I leave with you; my peace I give
unto you." With the calm assurance of a tri-
umphant faith the great apostle cried out, " Who
shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?
Shall God who justifieth? Who is he that con-
demneth ? Is it Christ who died, yea, rather, who
is risen again, and is even at the right hand of
God, and also maketh intercession for us? " Such

232 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

questions bear their absurdity on their face. If
the Father justifies, and the Son who died and
rose again, intercedes for the disciple, his safety
at the hour of death is assured. His sins are com-
pletely forgiven. They are, as it were, blotted
out, and the condemning consciousness of his sin
is utterly silenced. The sting of death is sin, but
if Christ bore the believer's sin on the cross, the
sting is extracted. Reconciliation has taken the
place of condemnation. " There is now no con-
demnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." This
is the mystery of Christ and the glory of his cross,
revealed in the experience of every trusting dis-
ciple. Christ bore his sins; and he shares Christ's
peace. It is a double fellowship.

But his peace rests not only upon what Christ
has wrought for him, but upon his continued love
and ever living interest. " Whom He loves He
loves to the end." Nothing, not even death with
all its power, " shall be able to separate him from
the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our
Lord." Christ's earthly mission was accom-
plished; but his heavenly service still goes on, and
will go on until the last disciple is safely sheltered
in the heavenly home. The dying victim of Cal-
vary has become the ever living and victorious
intercessor for his believing and accepted follow-
ers. " And so it shall come to pass that at even-

PEACE AND LIGHT ON CROSS 233

ing time it shall be light." Every humble saint
as he closes his eyes upon the familiar scenes of his
earthly sojourn, and looks through the open por-
tal of the mansion prepared for him, can calmly
say as did Stephen, the proto-martyr, " Lord
Jesus, receive my spirit."

CHAPTER V

MRS. EMMA WILLARD, THE PIONEER IN THE
HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN

ALL great movements have their humble be-
ginnings. All reforms educational, moral
and religious can be traced back to some inspired
soul or souls, gifted with wisdom in advance of
their time, endowed with a courage which scorns
all thought of defeat, whose dreams become con-
victions, whose desires assume the nature of in-
domitable purposes, who conquer success in spite
of indifference, ridicule and opposition. All ad-
vance in the onward march of civilization has been
led by pioneers who pushed out into the untried,
and by their inspiring example have extended the
boundaries of human effort and knowledge and
happiness.

The higher education of women is a modern
movement, and had its beginnings within the mem-
ory of men now living. It was a reform against
long continued neglect and unaccountable preju-
dice, in the direction of the completeness and exal-
tation of human life, personal, domestic and social.

234

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 235

It has been a conspicuous element in the ad-
vancing civihzation of the nineteenth century, and
has given a distinction and a glory to it, which
nothing else has. It is doubtful if anything has
occurred during the last hundred years more in-
dicative of the progress of our time than the of-
fering to young women of educational advantages
equal to those provided for young men. I wish to
call attention to the beginning of this great move-
ment, and to the name and service of one, who
must ever be held in honor as the richly endowed,
consecrated and successful pioneer in the higher
education of woman.

It will not be forgotten by those familiar with
English literature that Daniel Defoe, writing in
1697, in "An Essay upon Projects," proposed
among other things " An Academy for Women,"
which has been called " surprisingly modern " in
its views and suggestions. He opened his plan
with the following generous confession: " I have
often thought of it as one of the most barbarous
customs in the world, considering us as a civilized
and Christian country, that we deny the ad-
vantages of learning to women. We reproach the
sex every day with folly and impertinence, while
I am confident, had they the advantages of edu-
cation equal to us, they would be guilty of less than
ourselves."

236 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

After discussing the question of woman's ca-
pacity and native endowment, he presented his
plan of having one plain building " in a form by
itself, as well as in a place by itself, the gardens
being walled in and surrounded with a large moat,
and but one entrance." Admission to the acad-
emy should be voluntary on the part of the stu-
dents, and also continuance in it. " An act of Par-
liament should make it felony, without clergy, for
any man to enter by force or fraud into the house."
For the school thus secluded and guarded, he pro-
posed a curriculum which was quite full, including
languages, history and literature, as well as music
and dancing. Indeed he says, " To such whose
genius would lead them to it I would deny no
sort of learning." One such academy at least he
would have " in every county in England, and
about ten for the city of London." He closed
the essay with the following paragraph, " I need
not enlarge upon the loss the defect of education
is to the sex, nor argue the benefit of the contrary
practice; it is a thing that will be more easily
granted than remedied. This chapter is but an
essay at the thing; and I refer the practice to those
happy days, if ever they shall be, when men shall
be wise enough to mend it."

Those happy days were slow in coming. One
hundred and twenty-four years passed away, be-

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 237

fore a successful attempt was made to mend the
condition Defoe deplored, and made not by the
wisdom of men, but by the enlightened zeal of a
woman.

In the year 1821 there was founded in the city
of Troy, N. Y., a Female Seminary, so called, by
Mrs. Emma Willard, for the avowed purpose of
furnishing to young women an education higher,
broader and more complete than any then open to
them, or hitherto supposed to be necessary for
them. This Seminary still exists, and for ninety-
two years has sought to carry out under various
successful administrations the noble purpose of its
gifted founder and first principal, though not at-
tracting to itself so much attention from the out-
side world during the later part of its history as
during the earlier, for reasons largely external to
itself, notably because of the growing recognition
and triumph of its purpose, and of the existence
and multiplication of similar and larger institu-
tions in the country.

At its beginning this Seminary was a new move-
ment, an untried experiment, and was looked upon
by many minds with indifference and unbelief, and
by not a few with open hostility; and the devoted
founder was regarded as a dreamer or a fanatic.
It is not easy for us to put ourselves back into the
educational status even at the beginning of the last

238 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

century. Indeed we are quite likely to be de-
ceived by the eloquent perorations of those, who
laud the spirit, plans and achievements of the early
settlers of this western world, which are often
" without fact or reason."

Hon. Andrew S. Draper, Superintendent of Ed-
ucation in the State of New York, speaking of
these rose-colored representations, once remarked
facetiously, that from them one would expect to
find a schoolhouse standing on Plymouth Rock
the morning after the landing of the Pilgrim
Fathers. The truth is that even the system of
common schools was a matter of slow growth in
New England as well as in the New Netherlands,
and only comparatively recently has it attained the
scope and completeness which it now has. When
the nineteenth century dawned, after a century and
three quarters of struggle, hardship and poverty,
of the conquest of untamed nature, of warfare
with the Indians, and with the mother country in
the long and exhausting struggle for national in-
dependence, there were hardly more than twenty-
five institutions called Colleges in the country, and
these were little superior to modern high schools.
They were all of course for young men. These
first educational institutions had in view primarily
the preparation of candidates for the Christian
ministry and the so-called learned professions.

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 239

The general education for young men was exceed-
ingly meager and limited, while that for young
women was distressingly so. In many cities a
high school supported by public taxation had to
fight for an existence, and a high school or a
Latin school distinctively for girls was long and
bitterly opposed in the Athens of America, on the
ground of increased taxation and declared use-
lessness.

Mrs. John Adams, near the close of the eight-
eenth century, said, " Female education in the best
families went no farther than writing and arith-
metic, and in some few and rare instances, music
and dancing." The question of woman's sphere
was rarely or never discussed in those days, either
because it was supposed to be so narrow that it
was hardly worth discussing, or because it was
looked upon as fixed and determined by the de-
crees of nature and the Almighty, and therefore
unalterable and unimprovable.

Such was the condition at the beginning of the
last century, and well on towards its middle, and
on the other side of the Atlantic as well as on this.
Indeed America has always been far in advance
of the Mother Country on the subject of free,
popular education, and is to-day, an education free
to all regardless of condition, sex or religious test.
It is only within a few years that the restriction

240 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

was removed from the great English Universi-
ties, and Dissenters admitted to their privileges,
and the Nonconformists are still engaged in a bit-
ter struggle for their rights, and suffering arrest,
loss of goods and imprisonment for the sake of
conscience and principle. However backward our
own country was in its sentiments, and in making
equal educational provision for its sons and its
daughters, no other nation was in advance of it.
The general belief, a hundred years ago and less,
as to the sphere of lovely woman found expres-
sion in the familiar couplet,

" To eat strawberries, sugar and cream,
Sit on a cushion and sew up a seam,"

a belief which a seeker may find still in districts
not wholly rural.

The following rules were adopted in the estab-
lishment of a grammar school in New Haven in
1684: "For ye instruction of hopeful youth In
ye Latin tongue and other learned languages soe
far as to prepare such youths for ye Coledge and
public service of ye country in Church and Com-
monwealth. . . . And all girls be excluded as Im-
proper and inconsistent with such a Grammer
Schoole as ye law enjoins, & is ye Designe of this
Settlement."

President Charles F. Thwing, in his volume en-

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 241

titled " A History of Higher Education in Amer-
ica," makes the following confirmatory statement,
" The education of women for two centuries had
relation to their condition as wives and mothers.
Their education was, like that life, simple, prosaic,
narrow. The first President Dwight said, * The
employments of the women of New England are
wholly domestic' Education, therefore, hardly
extended beyond reading, writing and arithmetic.
In Boston girls were not allowed to attend the pub-
lic schools until the year 1790, and then their at-
tendance was limited to the months of summer.
Two years before, the town of Northampton voted
not to be at any expense for schooling girls."

To attempt to provide an advanced education
for young women equal to that provided for young
men, was looked upon, at first, as a reform against
nature, a quixotic dream. It was not a question
of a few fathers considering the wisdom of edu-
cating their daughters in the highest branches of
human knowledge, but it was a general question,
viz., whether any fathers should run the risk of
^ allowing their daughters to pursue the advanced
studies of the College and the University, lest
they should be unsphered, if not practically un-
sexed, and so unfitted for woman's practical duties
and ordained position in life.

Professor William Seymour Tyler has vividly

242 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

portrayed the strange opposition to the higher
education of women in the following words:
*' The objections to this idea of equalizing the ed-
ucational advantages of the two sexes were many
and various, and not always consistent with each
other or consonant with the courtesy due to the
gentler sex. It was an innovation uncalled for,
unheard of until now since the foundation of the
world, and unthought of now except by a few
strong minded women and radical men, who would
level all distinctions and overturn the foundations
of the family, of society, of Church, and of the
State. It was unnatural, unphilosophical, unscrip-
tural, unpractical and impracticable, unfeminine
and anti-Christian; in short all the epithets in the
dictionary that begin with un and in and anti
were hurled against and heaped upon it. . . . It
would be the entering wedge to woman's preach-
ing, practicing, lecturing, voting, ruling, buying
and selling, doing everything that men do, and per-
haps doing it better than men do, and overstock-
ing all the trades and professions. At the same
time it was insisted that such occupations as math-
ematics and philosophy were not suited to the
tastes and capacities of women; they did not want
them, and would not undertake them; and if they
did, they would ruin their health. Impair their

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 243

gentleness, delicacy, modesty and refinement, un-
sex them, and unfit them for their proper sphere."

Women's legal condition was defined by Black-
stone in his " Commentaries " in these words, '* By
marriage the husband and wife are one person in
law; that is, the very being or legal existence of
the woman is suspended during marriage, or at
least is incorporated and consolidated into that
of her husband."

The opinion of woman's subordination to man
prevailed among the most advanced thinkers and
idealists at the close of the eighteenth century.
Rousseau declared the object of woman in crea-
tion to be this, " Women are specially made to
please men. All their education should be rela-
tive to men. To please them, to be useful to
them, to make themselves loved and honored by
them, to bring them up when young, to take care
of them when 'grown up, to counsel and console
them, to make their lives agreeable and pleasant
— these, in all ages, have been the duties of
women, and it is for these duties they should be
educated from infancy."

Dr. Lyman Abbott, commenting on these quo-
tations, says, " This conception that woman was
made for man, that in marriage she lost her per-
sonal identity, and became merged and consoli-

244 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

dated with the man, entered into and determined
the popular ideal of woman's education."

If the higher education of woman was a reform
against nature, this was the reform, which Emma
Willard inaugurated, and the splendid task to
which she applied herself, with all the energy of
her strong nature and all the resources of her cul-
tivated mind. It is universally conceded that
though other schools were established soon after
hers, to her belongs the high honor of being the
pioneer.

The late George William Curtis in his scholarly
oration, delivered at the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the founding of Vassar College, quotes Sidney
Smith as saying " that the immense disparity
which existed between the knowledge of men and
women admitted of no rational defense, because,"
said the sensible canon, " nature has been as
bountiful of understanding to one sex as to the
other." " While he was writing," says Mr. Cur-
tis, " Mrs, Emma Willard, whose name should
always be held in honor at Vassar, and at every
similar institution in the world, was improving the
minds of young ladies at a school in Vermont, and
a few years afterward founded upon the banks of
the Hudson the Troy Female Seminary. This
was a conspicuous advance in the scope and con-
ception of such academies at that day. But the

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 245

time was ripe for Mrs. Willard, as it was for
Columbus, and for every leader of civilization."

This Is high praise, coming from such a distin-
guished source, which makes Mrs, Willard the
Columbus of the new world of woman's oppor-
tunity and development. Four hundred years ago
the time may have been ripe for discovery, discov-
ery may have been In the air, but to Columbus
alone belongs the honor of having plucked the
ripened fruit, of having sublimated the vaporous
ether into a solid continent, which ought In justice
to be called in its entireness to-day by his euphoni-
ous name, instead of his name being restricted to
the western portion of the British possessions in
North America.

It is no discredit to the Christian religion that
the advent of its divine Founder took place " in
the fullness of time," that then when prophetic
voices, national conquests by Roman arms, uni-
versal unrest and desire, and the perfection of the
Greek tongue had put all things In readiness. He
appeared and entered upon his sublime mission as
the Teacher and Redeemer of the race. The
preparation of the hour and the preparation and
appearance of the chosen instrument were both of
divine Providence. At the end of the first quar-
ter of the last century the hour had come for the
enlargement of woman's sphere, for her full

246 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

emancipation from the limitations which had so
long encompassed her, for the clear assertion of
the rights and possibilities of womanhood under
the Christian dispensation, and Mrs. Willard was,
under God, the woman for the hour, illustrating
in herself very much of the ideal, which she per-
sistently and persuasively held up for her sisters.

Descended directly from a Puritan ancestry,
which had its fountain head in this country in
Rev. Thomas Hooker of Connecticut, broadened
in her views and attainments by the liberal spirit
of her father, who openly rebelled against the
narrowness and oppression, which still lingered in
his day, we find Miss Emma Hart (for that was
her maiden name) at the early age of seventeen
teaching her first school, and mistress of the school
and of the situation, using the rod or pulling the
teeth of her pupils as occasion required (though
probably not giving to them the option as ex-
pressed by the child's request to her mother, if she
could not have her picture taken, might she have
a tooth out), encouraging them to fidelity, self-
respect and the love of study, independent in her
methods, thorough in her work, exciting the ad-
miration of the parents and the ambition of
the children, and already catching glimpses of the
scope, and giving promise of the success, of the
work to which she was to devote her life.

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 247

Passing from the little Connecticut village to
the more advanced work and larger opportunities
of her brief Vermont experience, her success was
still more marked. Her marriage to Dr. Wil-
lard, when she was twenty-two years of age,
seemed for the moment to put an end to her brief
career as an educator, and to blight all hopes which
she or her friends may have cherished of enlarged
usefulness and successful reform in this direction.
But soon financial reverses came to her husband,
and never were misfortunes more conspicuously
overruled for the accomplishment of a great pur-
pose, and the disappointment of one made to issue
in the benefit of a countless multitude. Smitten
to the ground, not by dazzling light, but by exces-
sive darkness and momentary blindness, she asked
with devout and submissive spirit, " Lord, what
wilt thou have me do?" Marriage was not to
her the great end of life. Through it she secured
the broader vision of life and duty. There
flashed upon her mind, probably as never before,
the needs of her own sex, the unjust disparity
which existed in the prevailing provisions for the
intellectual culture of the youth of her time, the
outline of the reform demanded, and her call in
the providence of God to the leadership of the
new movement. She understood and accepted
the significance of the hour. She " was not dis-

248 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

obedient to the heavenly vision." Life to her
took on a grander purpose. She rose with true
womanly courage, and undertook cheerfully and
resolutely her appointed work as the apostle of
the higher education of woman, the broader cul-
ture, the elevation, the progress of her sex.

In giving the chief place to Mrs. Willard in
the advanced educational movement for young
women, I do not forget the preparatory work of
Miss Zilpah Grant at Ipswich Seminary, of Abi-
gail Haseltine at Bradford Academy, of Miss
Catherine Beecher at Hartford, and of Eli Thayer
of the Oread Collegiate Institute at Worcester;
nor do I forget the noble work of that other noble
Avoman, Mary Lyon. But Mrs. Willard was
born ten years before Mary Lyon, and the Troy
Seminary antedated the South Hadley Seminary
by sixteen years. Mrs. Willard was born Feb-
ruary 23, 1787, and Miss Lyon, February
28, 1797. It should be added that the pub-
lic career of Mrs. Willard lasted almost a score
of years longer than Miss Lyon's, and was much
broader in its relations, although no higher in its
purpose.

It may be well at this point, now that the names
of these two educators have been associated in our
thought, to quote President Thwing's very just
and discriminating characterization of them, con-

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 249

tained in the volume already referred to. " It is
not a little significant that near the beginning of
the period of the enlargement of the higher edu-
cation and greater opportunity for women, stood
two women embodying noble and diverse charac-
teristics, movements and methods. The one em-
bodied intensity, and the other largeness. Mary
Lyon stood for an interpretation of life which is
still denominated Puritanism, and Emma Willard
for an interpretation optimistic and free. One
declared that to do her duty was her great pur-
pose, and the other regarded freedom of develop-
ment as her great desire for humanity and herself.
The one interpreted religion as life, and the other
sought to make life religious. One poured all of
life into religion, and caused its conceptions and
principles to become dominant. The other poured
all of religion into life, seeking to give to life a
symmetry more complete, a nobler sympathy, a
finer enrichment, and a higher and holier aspira-
tion."

President Thwing goes on to say, " Each of
these two types embodies advantages and disad-
vantages. Each is subjected to perils. Intensity
is in peril of narrowness; liberality and largeness,
of vagueness and looseness. . . . But both Miss
Lyon and Mrs. Willard were largely saved from
falling into the evils and weaknesses of their re

250 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

spective methods. Each made a noble contribu-
tion to the education of women, important in it-
self and for the periods of their service, and which
also bore the seeds of yet greater development."
While conducting her school at Middlebury,
Vt., Mrs. Willard projected the educational plans
which she afterward carried out with such signal
ability and success. By the character of her
school, as well as by the publication and circulation
of her advanced views on woman's education, she
was already attracting to herself the attention of
educators, and men prominent in business and
political life. Her programme, formulated with
great care and minuteness of detail, passed
through edition after edition, and called forth
wide approval and criticism. It contained the
basis of her whole system of education, and
by whatever name the school contemplated might
be called, seminary or college, it was in all
essential respects of college-grade, and has fur-
nished the foundation of all distinctive colleges
for young women. It had in view large public
buildings, a library well supplied with books in all
branches of knowledge, laboratories, philosophical
apparatus, a large staff of teachers, a board of
Trustees, and generous aid from the legislature
of the State. The plan was too large, the en-
terprise too expensive, to be carried on by any one

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 251

person or by private benevolence — at least, in
those days. It was a great public institution
which she contemplated, and was designed to con-
fer incalculable benefit upon society at large, upon
every community, upon the State and the Nation,
and therefore would be justified fully in making
its appeal to the public treasury.

By the advice of influential friends, Mrs. Wil-
lard decided to make New York State the arena
for her new and " lively experiment." A be-
ginning was made at Waterford, and after two
years the school was transferred to the more
favorable location in the city of Troy, and was
called " The Troy Female Seminary." This was
under the shadow of the State capitol, only six
miles away, from which Mrs. Wlllard hoped to
receive practical sympathy and aid, as well as from
other States, and even from the national Govern-
ment at Washington. Then began the strenuous
work of education and appeal, which she under-
took single-handed, relying upon the obvious jus-
tice of her cause, and its unquestionable reasona-
bleness, to commend itself to the favorable judg-
ment of thoughtful, public-spirited citizens of
every rank.

She prepared an able and extended memorial,
and secured Its presentation before legislatures.
It attracted very wide attention. She solicited

252 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

personally the cooperation of legislatures, of
members of Congress, and of Presidents. She
sought to create public sentiment, to overcome in-
difference, to remove prejudice, to kindle en-
thusiasm, and to secure private benefactions and
State patronage. Hers was a work of agitation,
in which reforms always begin. Her language,
which was certainly not wanting in force or pre-
cision, indicates the nature of the objections she
met. In a letter she wrote, " I am gratified with
your sentiments on female education, and I wish
legislators thought as you and I do. They can
expend thousands for the education of male
youths, but when was anything ever done by the
public to promote that of females? And what is
the reason of it? It is not because the expense
is valued, nor because fathers do not love their
daughters as well as their sons. It is partly from
inattention to the subject, and partly from the
prejudice that if women's minds were cultivated
they would forget their own sphere, and intrude
themselves into that of men, . . . because a few
individuals of masculine minds have forcibly
broken through every impediment, and rivaled the
men even in their own department. . . . They
might as well reason that because there is now and
then a brawny woman who can lift a barrel of
cider (was that the kind of exercise customary

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 253

among young ladies of the olden time?) her
whole sex should be kept constantly within doors
and not allowed to exercise, less if they should at-
tain the full perfection of their strength, they
would contest the prize upon the wrestling ground,
or attempt to take the scythe and the hoe from
the hands of men, and turn them into the kitchen."

Again she wrote, " I think the business of edu-
cation is not to counteract the decision of nature,
but to perfect ourselves in nature's plan." And
again, " Education should seek to bring its sub-
jects to the perfection of their moral, intellectual
and physical nature, in order that they may be of
the greatest possible use to themselves and others."
And once more, " Another error is that it has been
made the first object in educating our sex to pre-
pare them to please the other. But reason and
religion teach that we too are primary existences;
that it is for us to move, to the orbit of our duty,
around the holy center of perfection; the com-
panions, not the satellites, of men."

These are noble sentiments, marked by sanity,
full of " sweetness and light," and the wonder is
that they did not win their way at once to the
acceptance of every mind. Mrs. Willard scorned
the idea that the higher education would unsex
her sisters, or would educate them away from the
simple, practical, homely duties of life. It was

254 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

not to unfit them for their lot, and make them dis-
contented with their environment; but it was to
fit them to dignify every duty, to give them power
over their environment, to make them better sis-
ters, and wives, and mothers, and members of
the social order, in a word, not to change their
sphere, but to interpret it, and enlarge and en-
rich it. What Margaret Fuller claimed near the
middle of the last century as woman's birthright,
viz., " the freedom, the religious and intelligent
freedom of the universe, to use its means, to learn
its secrets, as far as nature has enabled her," Mrs.
Willard claimed in its second decade with equal
earnestness and comprehensiveness of view,
when the distinguished transcendentalist was but
a child.

The opposition to her reform sometimes dis-
appointed Mrs. Willard, and sometimes aroused
her righteous indignation; but never chilled the
ardor of her purpose, or paralyzed the persist-
ency of her effort. Men from whom she expected
better things, withheld their sympathy, and legis-
latures their patronage and support; but her spirit
was undaunted, and her efforts were at last
crowned with a splendid and far reaching success.
The new location proved to be most favorable.
To the intelligent and sympathetic citizens of Troy
belongs the distinguishing honor of having cor-

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 255

dially welcomed the experiment, and of having
furnished the opportunity and the means for the
establishment of a Seminary for the higher edu-
cation of young women, which became at the same
time a model and an inspiration, and in that city
Mrs. Willard was enabled to furnish an illustra-
tion of her plan, approximating at least her lofty
ideal.

It has been said that " Mrs. Willard with all
her peculiar pride of sex and desire to elevate
women was far from being in sympathy with those
women who early began the agitation of those
intricate questions which pertain to ' women's
rights,' by which is usually meant ' political
rights.' " A brief extract from her reply to Miss
Catherine Beecher, who had appealed to her to
join certain ladies in Hartford in an organized
movement to secure the " rights " of women, will
indicate her views.

"Dear Madam: Sincerely do I regret that
in the present instance of an appeal to act jointly
with yourself and the highly respected ladies of
Hartford, the case should be one in which my
own opinion is not coincident with yours and
theirs. In reflecting on political subjects my
thoughts are apt to take this direction; the only
natural government on earth is that of the fam-

256 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

ily, the only natural sovereign, the husband and
father. Other just governments are these sov-
ereigns confederated, that they may together the
better secure the advantage of all their families
combined."

As showing Mrs. Willard's native brightness
and wit, which can co-exist with the most serious
purpose of a strenuous life, a letter to a cousin
accompanying a wedding present of a pair of
stockings, may be quoted.

" To J. D. Willard, Esq.

Dear Cousin, Herewith you will receive a
present of a pair of woollen stockings, knit by my
own hands, and be assured, dear Coz, that my
friendship for you is as warm as the material,
active as the finger-work, and generous as the
donation. But I consider this present as pecul-
iarly appropriate on the occasion of your mar-
riage. You will remark, firstly, that here are two
individuals united In one pair, who are to walk
side by side, guarding against coldness, and giv-
ing comfort as long as they last. The thread of
their texture Is mixed, and so, alas, Is the thread
of life. In these, however, the white is made
to predominate, expressing my desire and confi-
dence that thus it may be with the color of your

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 257

lives. Xo black is used, for 1 believe your lives
will be wholly free from the black passions of
wrath and jealousy. The darkest color here is
blue, which is excellent, when we do not make it
too blue.

Other appropriate thoughts rise to my mind in
regarding these stockings. The most indifferent
subjects, when viewed by a mind in a suitable
frame, may furnish instructive inferences, as saith
the poet —

"The iron dogs, the peat and tongs,
The bellows that have leathern lungs.
The fire, wood ashes, and the smoke.
Do all to righteousness provoke."

But to the subject. You will perceive that the
tops of these stockings (by which I suppose court-
ship to be represented) are seamed, and by means
of seaming are drawn into a pucker. But after-
wards comes a time when the whole is made plain,
and continues so to the end and final toeing off.
By this I wish you to take occasion to congratu-
late yourself that you have now come to plain
sailing.

Again as the whole of these comely stockings
was not made at once, but by the addition of one
little stitch after another, put in with skill and
discretion, until the whole presents the fair and
equal piece of work which you see, so life does not

258 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

consist of one great action, but millions of little
ones combined, and so may it be with your lives,
no stitch dropped when duties are to be done, no
widenlngs made when bad principles are to be re-
proved, or economy is to be preserved, neither
seaming nor narrowing when truth and gener-
osity are in question; thus every stitch of life
made right and set In the right place, neither too
large or too small, too tight or too loose — thus
may you keep on your smooth and even course,
making existence one fair and consistent piece, un-
til having both passed the heel, you come to the
very toe of life, and here, in the .final narrowing
off, and dropping the coil of this emblematical
pair of warm companions, of comforting associ-
ates, nothing appears but white, the token of inno-
cence and peace, of purity and light; and may you,
like these stockings, the final stitch being dropped
and the work completed, go together from the
place where you were formed, to a happier state
of existence — a present from earth to heaven.
Hoping these stockings and admonitions may
meet a cordial reception, I remain, In true blue
friendship, seemly, yet without seeming, yours
from top to toe,

Emma Wlllard."

Mrs. Wlllard's husband died in May, 1825,

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 259

four years after the establishment of the school.
He was twenty-eight years older than she, and
had been her helper in many ways, relieving her
of the financial management of the school, being
a wise counselor in all her perplexities, and filling
the place of resident physician. From that time
on, for twenty years until her retirement from the
principalship, the entire management of the rap-
idly growing school rested upon her shoulders.

It is not within the purpose of this paper to
sketch Mrs. Willard's activity and usefulness in
many directions, as the author of numerous val-
uable text books and other literature, as a poet of
recognized ability, as an active friend of philan-
thropy at home and abroad, as a leader in social
and literary circles burdened with a large cor-
respondence, as the discoverer and advocate of a
new theory of the circulation of the blood which
attracted at the time much attention, as the earnest
supporter of every good cause, educational and
patriotic, which had in view the diffusion of knowl-
edge, the elevation of society, the progress of the
State and the Nation, and the welfare of humanity.
All these numerous and exacting activities, which
were continued until her death in 1870 at the age
of 83, and which made her, as another has said,
" the representative woman of her generation,"
together with details of her unfortunate second

26o THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

marriage, which cast the shadow of a great dis-
appointment upon her middle life, all these will
'be found narrated in her complete biography.
Her peculiar glory was the service she rendered
to the education of her sex, in securing for it a
more general recognition of its importance and a
wider scope in its essential character. This serv-
ice made her a benefactor worthy of special honor
among all who believe in the value of education,
and in the equal rights of all to its inestimable
advantages.

To Mrs. Willard's school were gathered pupils
from far and near, many coming from the South,
and from it she sent forth six thousand educated
young women into the homes of our land, with
such measure of education as they were able in-
dividually to take on (or rather to take in, for edu-
cation is not an external matter), of whom five
hundred became teachers, who caught something
of her spirit, and labored to carry out her purpose.
It was not for her school alone that she labored
and pleaded, but for the establishment of similar
schools everywhere. Her thoughts were as broad
as womanhood, and embraced her entire sex.
She endeavored to show in Troy what could be
done, what ought to be done, and what must be
done for the education of woman, if she is to

MRS. EiMMA WILLARD 261

reach the summit of her development and useful-
ness, the divine goal of her womanhood.

Other influences have, of course, been at work,
and other hands have been busy, but in the rapid
progress and the large fruitage of these later
years, it is only just to recognize the influence and
the hand of the founder of the Troy Seminary.
From this fountain have flowed streams, which
have fertilized the soil out of which Vassar,
Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bryn Mawr,
Radclifte, Barnard, and other distinctive schools
for young women have sprung blossomed-crowned
into life, and from those eloquent walls on the
banks of the upper Hudson has gone forth the
authoritative mandate that has already opened
the doors of many of our colleges to both sexes,
upon equal terms and with equal privileges.

Mount Holyoke Seminary was founded in 1837,
and changed its name to College in 1888, Vassar
College in 1861, Girton, the first English College,
in 1870, Smith College in 1871, Wellesley in 1875,
Radcliffe in 1879, Bryn Mawr in 1880, the Col-
lege for Women in Western Reserve University
in 1888, the Women's College in Brown Univer-
sity, 1 89 1,* and Barnard in 1900. It should be

* An early friend of the higher education of women in Rhode
Island was John Kingsbury, LL.D. He was a Trustee and
Fellow of Brown University from 1844 to 1874, the date of his
death, and Secretary of the Corporation fronn 1853 until he died.

262 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

remembered that an historic beginning in the di-
rection of female education was made in Ohio in
Oberlin Institute, as Oberlin College was first
called, which was chartered in 1834. The his-
torian says, however, that " the method of giving
a College education to women and men together
was not a primary thought. The primary thought
was to give an education to women of the sort
which they were fitted to receive. The condi-
tions necessitated the giving of the education to
both men and women upon equal terms." At
the commencement in 1841 three women received

In 1828 he founded in Providence a school which he called a
" Young Ladies' High School," a term not yet emplo3'ed in our
system of public education, and which was a marked advance
on anything provided for young women at that time. It was a
private school, and probably attracted few pupils outside of
Providence and its immediate vicinit3\ In it was offered in-
struction in history, advanced mathematics, and the ancient as
well as modern languages. The movement called out not a little
ridicule at the beginning, the boys on the street, as Mr. Kings-
bury passed by, shouting in derision, " There goes the man who
is teaching the girls Latin." The school room was furnished with
a carpet and cloth-covered desks, and chairs in keeping with the
other furnishings. Not a few citizens regarded the expenditure
as mone}^ wasted. It attracted much attention and visitors from
abroad on account of its novelty. Dr. Kingsburj' conducted the
school with notable success for thirty years. It was subsequently
under the care of Professor John L. Lincoln of Brown Univer-
sity, and later of Rev. Dr. John C. Stockbridge, much of the in-
struction being given by Professors of the University. The school
was continued until 1877. The name was changed by Prof.
Lincoln to " Young Ladies' School," the term " High " having
been adopted to designate a public school grade. It was the
precursor of the Women's College in Brown University.

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 263

degrees, the first women, it is said, to receive the
degree of Bachelor in Arts in the United States.

Professor Wiinsterberg says, " To-day there is
no need of defending the claims of women; the
women themselves have declared with pride that
the battle is now won. We no longer hear the
old-fashioned pitiful arguments that the women
have too small a brain for study, or that their
health breaks down if they go through a college
course, or that they lose charm and become un-
womanly if their education goes beyond the finish-
ing school, or that they are bad housekeepers and
selfish mothers if they have too much intellectual
training. All these exaggerations which belonged
to a period of transition have melted away. The
social prejudices have disappeared, and any one
who should argue to-day against the principle of
college education for women would appear a relic
of by-gone times."

The education of seventy-five years ago was not
the education of to-day. The progress has been
remarkable. It has been more than an evolution;
it has been a revolution. Mr. Weise, in his
" History of Troy," says that Mrs. Willard's
school " had not at the time of its establishment
its equal in the United States," that is, for the
education of young women, and that she was " the
first woman in America to place the standard of

264 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

female education upon the same plane of study
which was then pursued by young men in the
various colleges and higher academies in the
land." And her biographer, Dr. John Lord, tells
us that, at first, Mrs. Willard was compelled to
create her own text-books in certain branches of
study, which possessed such excellence that they
were widely used, and passed through many edi-
tions. But the scope of education is far greater
now than was possible then. The frontiers of
human knowledge have been pushed farther and
farther back. New sciences have been discovered,
and old ones have been greatly modified and ex-
tended. New studies have been introduced, and
better methods and improved apparatus. The
curriculum has been reconstructed and enlarged
many times, and the standard has been immensely
elevated. Colleges that were only colleges In
name are now such in fact, and a few are prop-
erly called Universities, probably as many as will
be necessary to meet the demand for years to come.
In nothing probably within the memory of living
men and women have there been changes so great,
improvements so marked, advances so noteworthy,
as in the matter of education. In saying this it
is not necessarily implied that all changes that
have been introduced in our educational system
and methods, have been in the direction of gen-

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 265

nine and unquestioned improvement. There must
be some just reason for doubt and criticism, when
so thoughtful and sane an educator as Dean Briggs
of Cambridge is prompted to invent and give pub-
Hcity to the phrase " old fashioned doubts con-
cerning new fashioned education."

It should be remembered also that progress In
knowledge in these recent years, of which we make
our boast, has been largely confined to the natural
or physical sciences, to the discovery and utiliza-
tion of the facts and forces of nature, to inven-
tion and the increased comfort of living. The
standards of art, architecture, literature, philos-
ophy and religion are all in the past, and all
students of these branches of knowledge are com-
pelled still to sit at the feet of the old masters.

But in all this actual progress, these vaster re-
sources, these multiplied facilities, Mrs. Willard's
Ideal has not been outgrown, nor can It be ever
outgrown. It was, to use her words, " the per-
fection of the moral and intellectual nature of
woman." It was not the mere accumulation of
knowledge, but It was the effect which all good
learning should have upon the discipline, the
growth, the expansion, the moral elevation of the
mind Itself. To the realization of this lofty ideal
all knowledge known and to be known, all fresh
discoveries In science, all progress In education

266 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

by the increase of its contents or the improvement
of its methods were to be made to contribute.
Mrs. Willard looked upon education not as an
end, but as a means, and all enlargement of the
means would have the same sublime, spiritual end
in view.

Professor Henry Fowler in an article on " The
Educational Services of Mrs. Willard," published
in the American Journal of Education in 1859,
said very justly — "She is preeminently a repre-
sentative woman, who suitably typefies the great
movement of the nineteenth century for the eleva-
tion of woman. Her life has been consecrated
to the education and advancement of her sex, or
rather we might say that the Christian elevation
of woman has been the life itself." Mrs, Wil-
lard, therefore, seems to have been a pioneer not
only in her efforts for the higher education of her
sex, but in her views of the true aim of all educa-
tion,

Ex-Chancellor E. Benjamin Andrews, of the
University of Nebraska, in an article published
a few years since in an Educational Review, de-
clared that a change is now taking place in the
conception of the nature and aims of true educa-
tion. The old encyclopaedic idea which made it
little more than the mere amassing of knowledge,
is passing away. The aim which is now coming

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 267

to be accepted, he defined as fourfold, viz., first,
" character," secondly, " culture," that is, refine-
ment, a love for the beautiful in art, nature, litera-
ture and conduct, thirdly, " critical power," and
fourthly, " ability to work by rule," in other words,
to bring things to pass; but character first. Edu-
cation according to this definition is the cultivation
and development of one's intellectual and moral
powers, refinement of soul, an increased relish, in
Edmund Burke's phrase, for " the true, the beau-
tiful and the good," self-control, self-mastery for
worthy ends, the concentration of life and its
forces for the attainment of noble objects and
lofty ideals. Dr. Andrews went so far as to say
that " All reflecting persons are coming to feel
that unless schooling makes pupils morally better,
purer and sweeter, kinder and stronger in out-
ward conduct, it is unworthy the name."

I refer thus at length to Dr. Andrews' article
in order to say that where leading educators are
now coming to stand, Mrs. Willard stood clearly
and strongly seventy-five years ago. Let me re-
call her words. " Education should seek to bring
its subjects to the perfection of their moral, in-
tellectual and physical nature in order that they
may be of the greatest possible use to themselves
and others," a comprehensive and wholly admir-
able definition, upon which it would be difBcult to

268 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

improve, and which is worthy to be inscribed in
letters of gold over the entrance of every seminary
and college in the land.

Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, an early graduate of
Vassar College, and the first female student in
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who
became an eminent teacher in the Institute and
an active promoter of the higher education of her
sex, adopted in her College course as a sacred rule
of life, " I must keep the body in good condition
to do the bidding of the spirit."

Mrs. Willard in her broad plan for the perfec-
tion of her sex, did not overlook the physical needs,
though she had few or none of the artificial helps
found in the schools of to-day. A recent writer
on physical training for women says, " In many
respects the gymnasium of a girls' college is equal
to that of any other college. The girl students
have their boat clubs and regattas, into which they
enter with as much spirit as if the scene were New
London, and the event the ' varsity ' race. While
the girl students built up brain cells by study, they
also gain muscle by exercise, and the girl college
graduate of the present day can put up a dumb bell
as neatly and proficiently as she can analyze the
teachings of Kant or Schlegel. In fact she does
the one all the better for having done the other.
In addition, the game of tennis has served to de-

MRS. EiMMA WILLARD 269

vclop broader chests and stronger muscles. The
bicycle and tricycle have won many young women
Into knowing the delights of a healthy spin along
country roads. There is much reason for satis-
faction In this increase of health and vigor in
womankind, all the more so as too many young
men of the present day have not shown the same
eagerness toward physical development. It Is to
he hoped that the narrow chested, thin, cigarette-
smoking young man who is too often seen on the
city streets, may be shamed into athletic training
by his sense of physical inferiority, when com-
pared with the girls of to-day, who can walk two
miles to his one, and who show in every move-
ment the perfect health which he lacks."

This position of Mrs. Willard, which laid
proper emphasis upon provisions for securing
soundness of body, has been endorsed by all later
friends of female education, and in no colleges do
we find better equipped gymnasiums, and better
average health, and more buoyant spirits than In
the colleges for young women. This Mrs. Wil-
lard believed to be absolutely essential to the suc-
cess of the second Item in her comprehensive
scheme, viz., the training of the Intellectual to the
highest point of development and culture. And
then above all, she insisted that the moral nature,
which Is the highest element In personality, should

270 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

be brought under such enlightenment and disci-
pline as to bring it more and more into harmony
with the laws of right-being and right-living, and
the known will of the Maker of us all.

But even this was not, in Mrs. Willard's plan,
the ultimate purpose of the higher education.
But the whole nature, thus disciplined and per-
fected, was to become a tempered and polished
instrument for " the greatest possible uses " to
humanity. Long years before the word " altru-
ism " was invented, Mrs. Willard was an altruist
of the purest type. No harp, however complete
and exquisite its workmanship, performs its mis-
sion until it gladdens and inspires human souls
with the melody of its music. No human mind,
however well-trained and furnished, fulfills the
high and holy purpose of its being and its train-
ing, until it takes its place among the active forces
of life for the comfort, the help, the uplifting of
humanity. The angels of the Christian faith,
resplendent with supernatural light and beauty,
are represented as messengers of God, " minister-
ing spirits sent forth to minister to them who shall
be heirs of salvation." The more exalted the life
of woman can be made, the more angelic will be
her ministry on the earth. Mrs. Willard dis-
tinctly recognized and suitably emphasized the
moral and religious element in a complete educa-

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 271

tion. She persistently excluded all sectarianism
from her Seminary; but she made it a Christian
school, pervaded by a Christian atmosphere, in
which the Christian faith was held up as the in-
spiration to all noble living, and the Christian
graces as the perfection of all highest character.

All knowledge, rightly apprehended, centers in
God. History is but the record of God's deal-
ings with the human race in its progressive devel-
opment. Literature is but the expression of
thought and life as it is lived in harmony with or
apart from God. Philosophy is " the knowledge
of phenomena as explained by, or resolved into,
causes and reasons, powers and laws," all of
which are traceable to the great First Cause.
Science is the systematic and orderly arrangement
of facts and principles, in the realms of matter and
force and mind, which discloses the results of
God's operations or methods of his activity. The
true scientist is, as has been beautifully said, sim-
ply " thinking God's thoughts after Him." Ex-
President Eliot has strikingly defined the true pur-
pose of scientific education in these words: "I
have never been able to find any better answer to
the question, What is the chief end of studying
nature? than the answer which the Westminster
Catechism gives to the question, What is the chief
end of man? namely, to glorify God and enjoy

272 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

Him forever." Knowledge and wisdom ought to
be one and the same thing, and would be, were it
not for the perversity of human hearts, so that
knowledge has come to mean the accumulation of
facts, and wisdom the right use of them. As
Cowper says,

" Knowledge and wisdom far from being one,
Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men,
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge, a rude, unprofitable mass,
The mere material with which wisdom builds,
Till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that it has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that it knows no more."

He who finds knowledge, then, finds facts about
God, the Infinite Spirit, the essential Life, by
whom all things consist. He who finds wisdom
finds God. The man who by common consent is
denominated '' the wise man," affirmed, " The
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." In
the broadest sense, Christ who was the Word, the
utterance of God, the manifestation of his wis-
dom as well as his power and love, could say, " I
am the truth." Kaulbach, in his famous cartoon
of the Reformation, grouped all the intellectual
activity of the seventeenth century around Luther
and the open Bible, the sun which, unveiled, il-

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 273

luminated the mind, and quickened it Into life, and
at the same time was the center around which all
good learning revolved, and toward which it grav-
itated.

Christianity, which is the synonym of light and
wisdom; which has been the mother of schools
as well as of churches; which has founded colleges
and universities; which has stimulated thought and
inquiry; which has pushed on investigation and
discovery; which has given birth to scholars and
libraries and literatures; which has insisted that
all history and all realms of truth and all worlds
of matter are the legitimate field of man's explora-
tions; which has taught that wisdom is the her-
itage of the people, that the right to know is the
inalienable right of every man and every woman,
and that knowledge should be as free as the light
and the air, and is as essential to man's normal
and healthy development, bases its primary argu-
ment for education upon the nature and immortal-
ity of the soul itself. Its capacity for growth is
one of the strongest scientific evidences for the
soul's immortality, and its immortality is one of the
strongest arguments for its highest present edu-
cation. The folly of education upon any low, un-
spiritual, materialistic conception of man is finely
expressed by Tennyson in the familiar words,

274 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

"We are not cunning casts of clay,
Let science prove we are, and then
What matters science unto men,
At least to me ; I will not stay,
For I was made for better things."

The effect of present wise training will endure
throughout eternity. Mental development and
enlargement, the cultivation of the intellectual and
moral powers, personal growth in this life, fit the
mind inevitably for a higher destiny in the life to
come. We may well shrink from going through
this life and out into eternity with dwarfed or
stunted powers, and be eager to know and to grow
until the germ of manhood and womanhood within
us shall expand into the large ideal and perfect
type, which is held up before us by the great
Teacher. Religion reveals to us the sublime
thought of God with reference to us, and the sub-
lime possibilities of development that are shut up
in every human spirit.

How narrow and belittling, then, is that theory
of education, which is sometimes called the utili-
tarian, which limits itself to practical studies, that
can be converted into silver and gold, and bread
and butter, to the useful branches of knowledge
as they are called, and overlooks the immortal
mind and its discipline and progress, and puts a
higher value upon material prosperity than it does

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 275

upon developed manhood and womanhood 1 You
all recall good Bishop Bienvenu, that ideal por-
traiture of saint and philosopher combined, drawn
by Victor Hugo in " Les Miserables." He denied
himself of every unnecessary comfort, and shared
the hardships and poverty of his flock. The only
luxury he would tolerate was his garden. This
he kept in exquisite order. His haughty house-
keeper reproved him, saying, " You who turn
everything to account have at least one useless
spot. It would be better to grow salads there
than bouquets." " Madam," retorted the good
Bishop, " you are mistaken. The beautiful is as
useful as the useful," and after a pause he added,
" More so, perhaps."

And how narrow is that view of education
which sometimes obtained in the past, which said
education is for the few and not for all, as if all
souls were not equally immortal, and were not
possessed of equal needs, and endowed with like
possibilities! And how narrow and indefensible
would be any theory of education which made a
distinction in sex, and provided a more abundant
and extended course of Instruction for boys than
for girls, as if all minds were not of equal value
and duration, and as if the progress of the human
race was not, under God, more dependent upon
the broad intelligence, the high refinement, the

276 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

generous culture of woman than upon any other
one thhig conceivable.

President Dwight, in an article in the Forum,
has well said, " So long as education is conceived
of as valuable merely for its uses, or as desirable
simply as fitting a person for his individual and
peculiar work, the higher education of women may
find many to oppose it with objections which may
have, perchance, seeming reasonableness. . . .
But if education is for the growth of the human
mind, the personal human mind, and if the glory
of it is in the upbuilding and outbuilding of the
mind, the womanly mind is just as important, just
as beautiful, just as much a divine creation, with
wide-reaching possibilities, as is the manly mind."

There are two views of education, or perhaps
I should say, two opposite tendencies, not alto-
gether unknown in our day, that are equally erro-
neous and indefensible. First, a thoroughly self-
ish view that exhausts the benefits of education
upon one's self, that leads to a life of exclusiveness
and separation, that disconnects a man from poli-
tics and the duties of citizenship, and a woman
from the plain duties of home, and the responsi-
bilities of social life, and the demands of charity,
that makes both men and women " impractica-
bles " and " impossibles," and makes life a sort
of useless, monastic, transcendental existence.

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 277

Mrs. Russell, the brilliant daughter of Father
Taylor of Boston, described the transcendentalists,
who separated themselves in the little select, lit-
erary Brook. Farm experiment, as " a race, who
dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable,
and never paid cash." An education which takes
one's feet out of the ordinary paths of life, and
prevents one from dealing in its customary cur-
rency and meeting its common obligations, has no
justification for its existence in this work-a-day
world of ours. President Henry Churchill King
of Oberlin College has wisely said, " Just this,
then, is the function of the college, to teach in the
broadest way the fine art of living, to give the best
preparation that organized education can give, for
entering wisely and unselfishly into the complex
relations of life, and for furthering unselfishly
and efficiently social progress."

A second peril to which we are exposed at the
present time, and it may be called the great edu-
cational peril of two continents, is that of exalting
the practical side of education in such a way as to
belittle the cultural and spiritual side, to determine
the character of education and measure its value
by its ability to coin itself into material possessions,
and minister to the bustling, noisy activities of our
age, forgetting that refinement, taste, beauty and
strength of character are the choicest possessions

278 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

of the soul, and the richest fruits of liberal culture;
Indeed, without which there is no liberal culture.

Professor Huxley's definition of " a liberal edu-
cation," expressed in what Sir Oliver Lodge calls
*' a magnificent sentence," is as follows: "That
man, I think, has had a liberal education who has
been so trained in youth that his body is the ready
servant of the will, and does with ease and pleas-
ure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable
of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine,
with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth
v/orking order; ready, like a steam-engine, to be
turned to any kind of work, and spin gossamers
as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose
mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and
fundamental truths of nature and the laws of her
operations ; one, who, no stunted ascetic, is full of
life and fire, but whose passions are trained to
come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a
tender conscience; who has learned to love all
beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all
vileness, and to respect others as himself. Such
an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal
education."

Arthur C. Benson in his able and discriminating
" Life of Walter Pater," accounts for Pater's lack
of appreciation at Oxford, his Alma Mater, and
the University, in which most of his life was spent,

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 279

in this way, " Moreover it is fair to say that the
air of the Universities is not at the present mo-
ment favorable to the pursuit of Belles lettres and
artistic philosophies. 1 he praise of academical
circles is reserved at the present time for people
of brisk, bursarial and business qualifications, for
men of high technical accomplishment, for exact
researchers, for effective teachers of prescribed
subjects, for men of acute and practical minds,
rather than for men of imaginative qualities.
This is the natural price that must be paid for the
(so-called) increased efficiency of our Universi-
ties, though it may be regretted that they main-
tain so slight a hold upon the literary influence of
the day. The whole atmosphere is, in fact,
sternly critical, and the only work which is em-
phatically recognized and approved, is the work
which makes definite and unquestionable additions
to the progress of exact sciences." And Ferris
Greenslet in his appreciation of the same English
scholar, says, " This is the sum of Pater's Cy-
renaic philosophy of life. Its plea was for a sys-
tem of morals as living and flexible as life itself,
and for a recognition of the importance of " be-
ing " as well as " doing." Such considerations
have perennial value, but especial significance in
an age like ours, when it is so fatally easy to

28o THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

glorify over much great aggregations of horse-
power, men of high voltage, and the efficient life."

This language portrays to us most strikingly
the tendencies in the mother country. In like
manner President Thwing, deploring the sadly di-
minished effect of the forces of the American Uni-
versity on American literature in these recent
decades, declares, " The reason lies in the ab-
sorption of men in things material. In the former
age men gave themselves to ideas; they now give
themselves to things. The reason is that this is
an age of materialism; it is the time of the reign
of the exterior senses. The voice of the imag-
ination is hushed. The altar fires of the creative
imagination are burned out, and in their place are
the fires of the steamship boiler and of the mogul
locomotive."

An Eastern college which has had an honored
history for more than a hundred years as a clas-
sical school, laying special emphasis upon the hu-
manities, graduated at a recent commencement
thirty-five men with the following degrees. Three
received the degree of Bachelor of Arts, three the
degree of Bachelor of Philosophy, two the
degree of Bachelor of Science, and twenty-seven
the degree of Bachelor of Engineering. This is
an extreme case ; but it is symptomatic.

Professor Miinsterberg declares, " There are

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 281

too many who fancy that everything which is not
directly useful for the vocational technique is a
waste of time and energy. They have stuffed our
colleges with practical subjects, and have allowed
far-reaching choice of courses in the high schools
under the one point of view that only that which
is directly applicable to the future trade can be
worth while. If this tendency were to win the
day, the life work would be built up on thinner
and thinner foundations of real culture, and our
society would be more and more threatened by
uneducated experts. The whole cultural level of
our community would sink, . . . the value of this
whole fabric and the worthiness of our social life
would rapidly diminish."

A sad day will it be for our colleges and uni-
versities, when the spiritual is crowded out by the
material, when the humanities are driven to the
wall by the so-called practical studies, when re-
finement and culture are at a discount and busi-
ness efficiency at a premium, when things are of
more value than high ideals and noble aspirations,
when the noise of machinery and the shouts of
the athletic field put an end to " the still air of
delightful studies," when physical strength counts
for more than moral strength and intellectual at-
tainment, when the popular applause is given not
to the successful student but to the successful

282 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

athlete, when the colleges are no longer able to
produce Longfellows, and Hawthornes, and
Lowells, and John Hays, because they have lost
the mold; In a word, when they cease to be pre-
eminently the homes of elegant culture. If that
day should ever come, which may God forbid,
then we shall look to the colleges for young women
to preserve the lofty aims, the high spiritual ideals,
the garnered and priceless results of a liberal edu-
cation.

In the University of Minnesota from the gradu-
ates of 1 910 the Phi Beta Kappa Society, whose
members are elected on the basis of scholarly at-
tainments and literary proficiency, elected to mem-
bership thirteen women and four men. President
Tucker of Dartmouth College, speaking of Trinity
College, Cambridge, said: "The curator took
me from alcove to alcove, and uncovered first the
manuscript of Lord Bacon's Novum Organum,
and in turn, the manuscript of Milton's Paradise
Lost, the manuscript of Newton's Principia, a
canto of Byron's Childe Harold, Tennyson's
In Memoriam and Thackeray's Henry Esmond,
all the product of One College in one University,"
and then he added, " England may multiply her
wealth, and increase her navy and expand her em-
pire, and she will still live more surely in the names
which will outlast her power." Ambassador

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 283

James Bryce, in his admirable volume on South
America, declares " The world to-day is ruled
by physical science and business." And again he
says in the same volume, " There is a sense in
which Shakespeare is a greater glory to England
than the Empire of India. Homer and Virgil,
Plato and Tacitus are a gift made by the ancient
world to all the ages, more precious, because more
enduring, than any achievements in war, or gov-
ernment, or commerce."

This distinguished scholar and publicist in a
commencement address at the University of Wis-
consin, uttered a much needed word of caution
against the all-absorbing pursuit of so-called prac-
tical studies. " Whatever a nation achieves, what-
ever a university achieves, is the result of patient
observation, close reasoning, and, let me add, of
the love of knowledge for its own sake; for the
man who is bent only on finding what is primarily
profitable will miss many a path at the end of
Avhich there stands the figure of Truth, with all
the rewards she has to bestow. Just as any na-
tion which should force its children to narrow
their energies to purely gainful aims, would soon
fall behind its competitors, and see its intellectual
life fade and wither, so any university which sac-
rificed its teaching of the theory of science to the
teaching of the practical applications of science

284 THINKING GOD'S THOUGHTS

would be unworthy of its high calling, and would
handle ev^en the practical part of its work less
effectively. The loss of a high ideal means the
loss of aspiration, of faith, of vital force."

Professor Willcox of Cornell University, rec-
ognizing the inappropriateness of old definitions
to modern conditions, says, " The most vital need
of college education throughout America is the
formulation and application of some definition of
liberal education which will apply to new condi-
tions," which virtually means some definition which
will deceive us into the belief that the new educa-
tion contains all the elements of broadening cul-
ture, and liberal training, and spiritual refinement
possessed by the old. New definitions will not
alter the nature of things, or endow with spiritual
life that which is of the earth earthy.

" In the world but not of it " should be as true
of culture as of religion. " In it " to elevate,
purify and ennoble its life, to exalt and spiritualize
its aims, and inspire it with the love of worthy
objects of human pursuit; but "not of it," unin-
fluenced by its low and debasing ideals, free from
its bondage to the material and the sensual, and
superior to its vulgar pleasures and its sordid and
perishable gains.

In .conclusion, I desire to say that continued in-
tellectual progress and moral improvement should

MRS. EMMA WILLARD 285

be the distinct and unweakening purpose of life.
Seminaries and colleges can at best only lay the
foundations of an education. All life must be
building the superstructure. The roof of our
schoolhouse is the broad heavens above us, and
the whole system of nature and Providence, of
moral government and divine grace revealed in
Jesus Christ, under which we live, is an educa-
tional system. He who ceases to learn and to
grow, is unworthy to live, and to have the vast
opportunities of life. Heaven is the home of
successful and victorious students, " disciples,"
that is, learners, the New Testament calls them,
who have diligently and faithfully learned the
truths of God in nature, in philosophy, in human
experience and in divine Revelation, and felt their
quickening and expanding, purifying and maturing
influence on their souls. The dying Goethe is said
to have asked for more light. Light, knowledge,
truth, which may be converted into faith, into
character, into service, into victory, into eternal
possessions, this should be the perpetual cry of
every immortal spirit, made in the image of God.

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